SCHOOL
CONTRACTS..SCHOOL WHO GETS WHAT, AND HOW MUCH:
Amongst all the other controversial and confusing aspects surrounding the current state of the industry in these unprecedent- ed times, one distinct category has surfaced which has courted particular con- troversy amongst licence holders and councils alike: school contracts.
Many of you may recall our article in last month’s edition on this topic, and the review as published by James Button of the Insti- tute of Licensing, so we now bring you a follow up to see how things have pro- gressed.
Let’s make one thing perfectly clear right from the start: anyone within the trade, or within education, or indeed within political movements, be they local authorities or central government, have always known that schools would need to change their entire strategic policies massively when they reopen.
This relates not only to getting to and from school, but also classroom layouts, teacher provision, lunchtime routines, even play- ground times, which were quite clearly going to result in “bubbles” or pre-deter- mined groups of children with set teachers.
The thing we could all see of course was… and this is HUGE….the effect on transport provision.
What do we mean? For those with a four- seat saloon vehicle, carrying two or three children and a passenger assistant, you were going to have to reduce to one pas- senger; for those with larger minibuses, possibly two passengers. Even coaches would suffer severely reduced capacity due to social distancing measures.
This of course means that the number of drivers and vehicles required to fulfil con- tracts was quite obviously going to have to be massively increased, in many cases four vehicles and drivers being needed as opposed to one. We will let that sink in for a while and refer back to it later on.
Early on at the beginning of the lockdown, news items in the local papers - along with our emails and messages going wild asking us to get involved - highlighted the fact that some district and county councils were con- tinuing to pay the full amount, or a high percentage of contracted amounts, to oper- ators for their school contracts, whether or
30 not those contracts were being fulfilled.
Other articles revealed that some operators – despite having been paid either the full amount or a slightly reduced figure – were not paying the drivers who undertake those contracts. We were advised of many of these instances by phone and email as well.
OK, we’ll get back to comments from the trade in a bit, as there were a lot of them – particularly on the PHTM Facebook page. We sprung into action: Firstly – as always – it was important to look at the Govern- ment’s position on the matter. This was set out in a bulletin in March entitled: Procurement Policy Note 02/20: Supplier relief due to COVID-19.
(
https://www.gov.uk/government/publica- tions/procurement-policy-note-0220-supp lier-relief-due-to-covid-19)
You can go on the link and read the full doc- ument, which pertains not only to public sector bodies but also the private sector. For that reason (and space limitations) we’ll not duplicate the full document here, but it’s worth a read if you haven’t seen it.
THE ACTUAL MESSAGE
One explanatory note set out the purpose of the PPN in slightly more understandable terms, as follows :
“Authorities are encouraged to protect cash flow as much as possible and to continue to pay suppliers, even if service delivery is dis- rupted or suspended. This might include a range of approaches that include advance and interim payments, payments being made on order (not receipt) and against
revised timescales. Authorities are asked to accelerate their payment practices.
“In addition:
• Where payment is based on outputs or results, and the supplier’s ability to per- form is impacted by Covid-19, the advice is that payments should be made based on the average of the invoices issued during the previous three month period.
• Payments should not be made where there is no contractual volume commitment to supply.
• Where possible, any payments made dur- ing the emergency Covid-19 period should be adjusted to ensure that the profit mar- gin is not paid on any undelivered aspects of the contract.
• In their invoices, suppliers must distinguish the elements which are attributable to the impact of Covid-19 from the ‘business as usual’ amounts that relate to the on-going services they are continuing to supply.”
This sets the stage for the rationale behind any schedule(s) of payment being made by any of the County Councils and District Councils that oversee school contracts in their district/region/county. However, it nei- ther recommends nor specifies a range of percentages of payment to be made to sup- pliers by those councils; that clearly is down to the individual procurement department in each area.
DOWN TO INTERPRETATION
And this is where the variation in policy sur- faces, big style. Around the country, apart
JUNE 2020
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