Bristol City Council told to urgently address procurement rule breaches
Council officers broke the rules around awarding work to external companies more than 200 times last year
Bristol City council officers have broken rules on awarding contracts amounting to the value of £69million.
It’s been reported that breaches in awarding contacts for goods and services occurred more than 200 times.
External auditors, Grant Thornton, found that almost one in seven contracts were in breach of regulations, that’s 14%.
The council say they have an effective and transparent system in place to detect if regulations aren’t followed. They say more training and a procurement policy will be introduced to prevent this from happening again.
A response from the authorities’ management said, “Procurement compliance training will be more widely rolled out and actual compliance activity reported quarterly to audit committee via internal audit.” They also accepted a recommendation to introduce a procurement strategy.
In total 203 re-tendering procedures were incorrectly followed, officially called procurement breaches. This is an increase from 94 breaches the previous year, reaching the total of £14million.
The auditor’s report stated that, “The overall level of breaches in both years is higher than we would expect and the increase and final value in 2021/22 is of some note.
“In our experience, high levels of breaches have been associated elsewhere with governance and procurement irregularities and, as such, the issue should be addressed as a matter of urgency.”
A separate report highlighted it as a “significant governance issue” for the authority.
According to external auditors, breaches like this reduce transparency and fairness in decision making, which can increase the chance of fraud, conflicts of interest and damage to reputation.
Bristol City Council said its response was in the report that can be found on the council website.