HAVING policies to ensure value for money has been described at a ‘no brainer’ for Dorset Council.

Yet, since it came into being almost 18 months ago the authority has lacked a systematic approach to ensuring the best return for its spending.

Executive director for corporate development Aidan Dunn says that the council has been seeking best value for money and to spend locally, where it can, but has not yet pulled together an all-encompassing systematic approach for all services.

“Work has been delayed on progressing this as a result of the current pandemic but the current financial challenges mean that this work now needs to be prioritised,” he said in a report to the council’s audit and governance committee on Monday.

Once the framework has been developed it will lead to a best value review of all the council’s services.

Cllr Bill Pipe backed setting up the framework and a timeline to achieve the work: “It’s a no brainer, it obviously needs to be done,” he said.

Mr Dunn said that the review also needed to look at ways of getting more Dorset companies to compete for council work, acknowledging that the process did put some off.

“Our performance framework is more complicated than that of Tesco,” he said, “ranging through care, to highways and to buying IT equipment…one of the things we are really keen on is to spend local where it’s the right thing to do…” he said.

“We need to make our notoriously complex procurement processes accessible because we recognise that it is costly to bid for work from the council and it can be time-consuming.”

He said that how successful the council was at buying locally would depend on the sector. In highways the council often ended up going to a national contractor because of the expertise and economies of scale specialist companies were able to offer.