Agenda and decisions

Salford City Council - Record of Decision

I, Councillor Hinds, as Chair of the Procurement Board and Lead Member for Finance and Support Services, in exercise of the powers contained within the City Council constitution do hereby approve:

(1)       The appointment of 2 appropriately skilled consultant project and programme manager through the CAPPS Construction and Professional Services Framework or the STAR Procurement Framework to provide support in connection with the City Council’s growing workload of grant funded infrastructure projects.  This will initially be for a 12 month period.

(2)       An option to extend the appointments beyond the initial 12 month period, subject to future work load, availability of funding and reaching agreement with the Councils HR team and that;

(3)       Delegated Authority be given to the Strategic Director for Place to authorise an extension, subject to future workload, availability of funding and reaching agreement with the Councils HR team.

The Reasons are:

·       Salford City Council’s Regeneration Team has successfully made submissions for external funding for a range of infrastructure projects through both Growth Deal and the Greater Manchester Mayor’s Cycling and Walking Challenge Fund (MCF).

·       The City Council’s Regeneration Team had already received authorisation from Procurement Board on the 23^rd January & 13^th March 2019 to appoint 3 project and programme managers, to lead on the development and delivery of these projects.

·       Further to this, following GMCA Board on the 30^th June 2019, the City Council was advised that it had also successfully secured additional MCF project development funding for the £28 million City Centre Salford ‘Active Centres, Corridors & Neighbourhoods Project’ and £2 million RHS links project.

·       In addition, further funding bids have been submitted for a significant pipeline of new projects.

·       Salford City Council together with the other districts across Greater Manchester are now coming under increasing pressure from the GMCA to ensure that adequate resources are in place to develop and deliver the MCF projects where funding has been awarded.

·       The Regeneration Team in the City Council has inadequate resource to fully meet this demand.

Options considered and rejected were not to appoint based on the following:

§  That without additional resource, the Council does not have the ability to deliver the infrastructure projects against which it has already secured funding.

§  Equally, the council’s ability to attract further grant funding for infrastructure projects is limited without additional resource in place.

Assessment of Risk: Overall risk to the Council is considered to be medium

This is based on the two bullet points immediately above, which relate to the council not being able to deliver externally funded projects.

Source of Funding:

The proposal to appoint 2 programme managers who will be working on projects   which are funded from the Growth deal grant and the Majors challenge fund, allow all costs to be re-claimed on a staged basis from the grant funding body at the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA).

Legal Advice obtained from Tony Hatton- 0161 219 6323

Financial Advice obtained from Natalie Birchall  ...  view the full decision text for item 5b

10:00am on Wednesday 25 September 2019 in the Boardroom, Salford City Council, Chorley Road, Swinton, M27 5DA.