NCA Housing: Helping Social Landlords achieve Efficiency Gains through collaborative procurement

Consortia members include Housing Associations, stock retaining Local Authorities and Arms Length Management Organisations (ALMOs) - who wish to improve the procurement and delivery of efficiencies on their capital works and maintenance programmes. The National Change Agent for Housing (NCA Housing) has a specific remit to support the establishment and development of procurement consortia and has assisted social landlords to:

establish an effective procurement consortium
access grant funding for the development of business plans and the start up to implementation
develop arrangements to maximise supply chain efficiencies
gain access to document templates and best practice guidance
measure and report cashable and non cashable gains made on an annual basis
benchmark performance with other consortia and procurement models

The HCA took over the responsibility for the NCA Programme in December 2008. Since then the main focus has been on assisting the NCA Consortia to improve their sustainability in terms of:

social /community benefits through targeted local employment, skills training and capacity building initiatives working in partnership with local/ regional agencies and stakeholders
economic gains through improvements in supply chain management and engaging with SMEs
environmental stewardship by reducing the environmental impact of their procurement activities such as waste and carbon footprint