Feedback from Audit and Governance Committee 29^th October on the draft Procurement and Contract Procedure Rules

Discussions of the potential to introduce scrutiny provisions in advance of contracts being awarded. For example, members can reserve projects for portfolio holder briefings and those that must come back to Executive for contract award, but there isn’t currently any provision for referral to Scrutiny or other Committees.

There were discussions over whether the £5m threshold for projects to return to Executive under certain conditions prior to the awarding of a contract set out in column 5 in the tables in appendix 2 of the rules should instead be a lower value, for e.g. £2.5m. In the alternative, should committees be notified prior to award, with a mechanism for contracts to be called in on the basis of that?

On environmentally sustainable procurement, sections 7.6-7.8 there was a request to include reference to Carbon monitoring and reporting. Scopes 1, 2 and 3 were mentioned, though I did outline that scopes 1 and 2 are defiantly outside the remit of procurement activity, but scope 3 could be a consideration here, noting also that any such technical data collection and reporting requirement would require funding to enable it to happen.

There is a typo in the PCPRs which was highlighted to A&G as follows: section 5.14 where the phrase immediately following the words “The total, revised value of the contract” should in fact read- including any proposed extension, variation or modification.

Feedback from the Constitution Working Group meeting of 29 October 2026.

The Constitution working group were supportive of A&G Committee’s view that the contract value for which an overspend triggers a return to Executive for approval of contract award to be lowered from £5m to £2.5m. They voted by majority vote to recommend the Procedure Rules, with this amendment to the Standards Committee. This requirement is in the Appendix 2 (governance Tables) in the PCPRs, and would apply to tables 2-5 that have this requirement, so the recommendation to the Standards Committee will be that the Rules are approved and recommended to the Shadow Authority, subject to this amendment.