Chartered Institute of Housing, 10th Anniversary Dinner, Procurement Strategy Launch - 2 October 2008

Mr Chairman, President, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen.

Many thanks for your warm words of welcome and kind invitation to join with you this evening to help celebrate the tenth anniversary of your Belfast office.  I am always very reluctant to accept invitations to speak that place me between guests and their dinner, so I assure you I will be brief.  

The Chartered Institute of Housing in Northern Ireland has certainly come a long way since the opening of your office here 10 years ago.  From small beginnings, you now have over five hundred members across Northern Ireland.  This represents remarkable progress in such a short period of time. Through your training and development service and your professional qualifications programmes, you have raised the standards for all those involved in housing.

More recently, you have created a new National Business Unit, giving more autonomy to the Institute in Northern Ireland.  You have worked hard to keep housing at the top of the political agenda here and lobbied hard with those in a position to make a difference.

There can be no better example of this than the leadership offered by the Institute during the consultation on the last draft budget which was a great source of support and encouragement to me. Your contribution, along with pressure from others in housing, helped me secure significant additional funding that I am already putting to very good use. But we must not stop there.  There is more to be done.  I will be looking for more of the same to maintain the pressure to bring in the additional resources necessary to make the real changes we all agree are so very badly needed.

Moving forward, I know that you have ambitious plans for the future.  Your Leadership Programme, where current and aspiring leaders can work and learn together, is particularly innovative.

I am also aware of your planned training programmes.  In particular, I noted your seminar planned next Thursday.  It is quite appropriately entitled ‘getting more for less - driving the efficiency agenda’.  I’m not on commission for the Institute, but if any of you here this evening haven’t already signed up, I can thoroughly recommend the content.  It has important and relevant read across to my New Housing Agenda and the Procurement Strategy that I am here to launch this evening.

In February, I launched my New Housing Agenda. Integral to that was my desire to increase the supply of social and affordable housing.  

I have committed my Department to meeting what will be very challenging Programme for Government targets, aimed at delivering 10,000 additional new homes over the next 5 years.

Against an increasingly difficult background of public sector constraint, my ambitious housing targets will only be achieved if we can find more innovative solutions.  Whilst I want to work closely with the private sector to generate even more private sector investment, we must at the same time make the public purse stretch further.  This new Procurement Strategy will be one of the key platforms to ensure just that.  In effect it is about getting more bang for your bucks.

The Strategy will streamline housing association procurement activity into four dedicated procurement groups.  This will be a more efficient way of doing business.  

By bringing housing associations together in a more structured and coherent operation, and, by pooling their experience, expertise and purchasing power, I believe we can make savings of up to 10%, over the next 5 year period.  And I don’t intend to make savings for the sake of them.  I assure you any savings we can generate will go back into the Programme, not the Treasury.

The Strategy will also encourage improved quality in design and greater use of non-traditional methods of construction.  Social housing will be more energy efficient and environmentally friendly as a result.

By using framework agreements to call off contractors and consultants for specific projects, additional efficiencies will be achieved.

I very much welcomed the Institute’s endorsement of this initiative at consultation stage.  

Your comments were constructive and were taken on board during the development process.  I look forward to your continued support as we now roll the strategy out in practice.

Those of you here this evening from the Housing Association movement are already engaged in forming the new procurement groups.  I know that you have been waiting patiently for the launch of this Strategy and I thank you for your patience and perseverance.

I know many of you here this evening are from the Housing Association movement and keen to hear of the next steps that will follow tonight’s launch.

I am pleased to confirm that we have now appointed Trowers and Hamlins as the National Change Agent for Northern Ireland and they will be here, on site, from 13 October to guide, support and navigate our new Procurement Groups through the process.  

They already have extensive experience of social housing procurement from their work in Great Britain and I have no doubt you will be well supported by them.

We will assume the costs for this work and have given Trowers and Hamlins as broad a remit as possible to allow each of the Procurement Groups to move as quickly in the initial years as they can manage.  By the end of this 5 year strategy, we expect all Procurement Groups to be fully compliant in public procurement policy, but Rome wasn’t built in a day and I assure you there will be flexibility to ease your transition.

Change is always difficult and I do not underestimate the challenges that lie ahead.  But as the last 10 years have shown, housing professionals here are well prepared to meet that challenge and I have no doubt the Institute will continue to show leadership to its members in helping them move forward together.

I am confident that this new strategy will make a valuable contribution to the New Housing Agenda. Working together we can bring about real improvements, effect real change and ultimately deliver real houses for those most in need. Because we must not forget that our ultimate aim is to meet housing need and we all share that same ambition.

Mr Chairman, President, Ladies and Gentlemen.  I would commend this new strategy to all of you here this evening and I thank you for the opportunity to launch this latest aspect of my New Housing Agenda here tonight.  

Congratulations on your last 10 years and my best wishes for your next 10.