Good news this week. The procurement policy for the NPDC has been reviewed and changes made, which should have a good outcome for local businesses.

Some good news this week. The procurement policy for the NPDC has been reviewed and changes made, which should have a good outcome for local businesses. The procurement policy is how NPDC projects are allocated to contract companies.

Do people recall a few months before the 2025 election the last term of elected officials decided to review the procurement policy for the Council. It was quite controversial at the time and a few “warm fluffy” statements were added, and some unusual clauses gave work to select businesses, and not all local businesses.

We’ve had a number of local businesses talk to us about the difficulty of winning projects from the engine room which allocates the contracts at the council. We can’t talk about individual situations, as this would have a negative impact on those businesses, but we were very aware this policy needed to be changed.

In a Council meeting last week the current elected officials voted on an overhaul of the 2025 procurement policy. We’ve attached some information and charts from this meeting showing how local businesses will be prioritised for local work – as we think they should be. We would hope this new system will remove any personal preferences within the council when contracts are allocated.

And it is good to see the financial accountability of the system has also been tightened up. We were aware from Deloitte’s audits in 2022 and 2025 some purchase orders were being issued after a contract was completed, not at the start as is normal business practice. The contractors would set the price with their invoice after the job was done, rather than the Council agree to the most competitive price at the start of the job. We are pleased to see this option has been removed in this 2026 version of the policy.

The ‘warm fluffy” approach has gone and the best interests of local businesses, and the jobs they provide for local people, have been built into the new policy. The expertise has to be there and the price right, from the local businesses, but the playing field has been levelled and defined, so the local economy is made a priority.

We are very pleased our new Elected Officials have focussed on this and made these changes.