Procurement

Rushcliffe Borough Council believes that services, supplies and works procured by the Council should be of a high quality, flexible and above all customer/user focused. The Council expects service providers to find an appropriate balance between being best on quality, value for money, equality, service and employment practices with the need to promote sustainable development.

When the council is buying goods and services the procurement process used will be dependent upon the value and urgency of the goods/services required. The process may be a ‘one off’ order, a quotation exercise or a full-blown tender exercise that may include advertising within Europe.

By default, Rushcliffe does all of its procurement using the Pro-Contract portal, which can be found using the following website: East Midlands tenders. Any supplier wishing to provide quotes or tenders should register to use the site if you have not already done so. The process takes about five minutes and is completely free. The portal will notify you if Rushcliffe or any other Local Authority request a quote or tender. Please always ensure that your email notifications are switched on.

Procurement opportunities can be advertised, and requests for quotations and tenders are sent and received electronically through the portal. Please note that Rushcliffe will no longer accept paper tenders, or responses sent by email or by phone and any received by these methods will be immediately rejected.

On occasion, Rushcliffe may also advertise the opportunity on the Source Nottinghamshire website or when legislation dictates it, we advertise on Contracts Finder or in the Official Journal of the European Union.

Although a number of procurement processes exist, the Council will mainly use the open or restricted tender procedures, as well as using Procurement Frameworks where deemed appropriate.

Under the open tender procedure, the Council will place an Expression of Interest advert in the Pro-Contract portal. If the opportunity matches an area of work you are interested in, you will receive an email inviting you to take part. After registering an interest, you will be able to take part in the tendering process by uploading a completed quotation/tender document, or by answering questions within the portal. Any questions a supplier may have can be sent via the portal, and evaluation notifications are sent and received within it too.

For a restricted process or from using a Procurement Framework, you may be directly invited to take part in a process. Invitation is again initiated by an email. Any supplier can then opt out of the process or proceed with the quotation/tendering process.

Information about how to do business with Rushcliffe Borough Council, is included in the council’s Procurement Strategy.

The rules by which we spend money on goods, services and works, are set out in our Standing Orders for Contracts (see Constitution Part 4 - Standing Orders Rules and Financial Regulations).

Rushcliffe Corporate Contracts list can be found within our procurement portal using the following East Midlands tenders' website. To find all of our contracts, click on the link called Contract Register (located at the top of the screen) next, select Rushcliffe Borough Council from the “Organisations” drop down list on the left-hand side of the screen, and then click on the green update button (bottom left). Once the system has filtered out only Rushcliffe contracts, the list can be downloaded in Excel format using the export buttons.