How do you organise a global event, ensure every contract is given with fairness and transparency yet also ensure the local area benefits as much as possible?

Not an easy task, but within the Procurement Team of the Organising Committee for the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games, this was our aim.

We knew the Games would bring significant benefit to Birmingham and the surrounding West Midlands, but how could this be maximised? Legacy was central to Birmingham 2022 from the moment the city was awarded the event, so how could we guarantee that the impact would live on long after the last athlete and spectator had left.

As with any huge project, the numbers jump out at you from the start. Birmingham 2022 was expected to deliver more than a million visitors, as an Organising Committee we would have around £400 million of contracts to award.

A further, less snappy, number was £213,477 - this is the amount whereby any contract over this figure must be awarded through a competitive tender process. The tender process rightly ensures that best value is selected, this including social value, but it also means that other factors cannot be factored in - these including where those bidding are based and the ethnicity of their leadership or ownership.

However, we wanted at least 66% of supplier spend to be to businesses with a West Midlands base.

From day one, it was clear this would be a tricky balancing act, not helped by the fact that being an ALB - Arm’s Length Body - can create a procurement process that is somewhat off-putting to smaller businesses - the very kind of West Midlands business we wished to attract.

Encouraging Local Businesses

If we rewind to late 2017 when Birmingham was awarded the Games, we were faced with a key task that required immediate attention.

How could local businesses be kept at the forefront of the process, yet without this add extra complication or delaying the process. After all, the Games had a fixed deadline and hundreds of millions would be tuning in globally to watch the Opening Ceremony.

A number of tactics emerged.

Raising Awareness

It stands to reason that for any business to bid for work it has to know that work both exists and that they may well fit the criteria. All tender opportunities were published on our business portal, with explanations on how procurement worked, and the UK Government’s Find a Tender service and Contracts Finder.

However, we of course knew that not every business owner is sat there pressing F5 on these pages. We also needed to be proactive.

Meet ups

We created opportunities for local businesses to meet with major suppliers for the Games and learn about sub-contractor opportunities. 

By building these links, we helped to ensure that the major suppliers thought of suitable businesses in the West Midlands when they needed to bring in additional resource.

In just one example of this in action, over the course of January and February 2022, we held four ‘Meet the Supplier’ events aimed at providing local businesses with an understanding of the opportunities available through the Games and how they could capitalise on these. 

Five of the Games’ largest suppliers covering areas such as event overlay, venue infrastructure, signage, Opening and Closing Ceremonies and Festival Live sites talked about the sub-supplier opportunities they have available. 

Some 410 regional and local businesses took part - many of them going on to pay a key role in Games delivery.

It would be remiss not to mention those we worked in partnership with facilitate these events, namely - Findit and the Coventry Growth Hub, Legacy Centre of Excellence, the Greater Birmingham Chambers of Commerce, including the Asian and Commonwealth Chambers and the Black Country Chamber of Commerce

Sub-dividing work packages

Many overall big projects would be of a size that smaller, local businesses might struggle to implement, and yet we were aware of vast numbers of businesses in Birmingham who could perform part of these larger tasks.

By dividing packages down into smaller lots, there was far greater opportunity for everyone to bid for the parts that truly matched their expertise.

Knowledge building

The Organising Committee recognised that however accessible we made the process of bidding for work, this was still not something that was comfortable for many smaller businesses. Picturing a sea of red tape, many would surely not even begin to engage with the process, imagining it taking much of their time for a bid that might ultimately be unsuccessful.

Focussing on SMEs from diverse communities, we worked with partner organisations to participate in the Greater Birmingham and Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership-funded Inclusive Commonwealth Legacy Programme (ICLP). 

The first cohort alone saw 40 local companies benefit, each gaining six months of peer-to-peer learning, training, and development, all facilitated by leading industry experts in an inclusive and supportive environment. 

Knowledge gained from this work will continue to benefit these businesses for generations to come.

Local - and diverse

There was, we should have mentioned, one more factor running throughout our work as an Organising Committee - a need to ensure diversity within suppliers.

Birmingham and the West Midlands is a wonderfully diverse region, home to people from more than 180 countries. For the Games to represent the region, those working on the Games also had to be representative of this broad spectrum of people and cultures.

From February 2021 all new suppliers were required to respond to questions relating to the diversity within their company, at the same time all existing suppliers were also contacted to retrospectively capture this data.

The findings are more interesting than the process, and, the supplier data captured showed that:

17% of suppliers were Ethnically Diverse Led Enterprises. (In the UK the average is around 5% - as reported by the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry)

28% of suppliers were Woman Led Enterprises. (In the UK, under 17% of all businesses are women led - data from the Gender Index).

4% of suppliers were Disability Led Enterprises. 

(note - for each of these the definition being that within the enterprise at least half of the partners or eight directors in day-to-day control of the enterprise were within the relevant group. Alternatively, if the enterprise has a sole proprietor they are within the relevant group)

Quite aside from the figures relating to the UK as a whole, we believe these figures compare favourably to other fixed-term project-based organisations across the region, UK and beyond.

Legacy - How we hope to leave our mark

Our role as a Procurement Team was to ensure suppliers delivered the Games we all hoped for, but also to ensure a legacy that enhanced the region for generations to come.

Just a short while after the wonderful Closing Ceremony, too early to truly judge legacy, how can this be assessed?

We look to the skills acquired and the enhancement of local businesses and the people behind them. The owners, board members and employees who live and work in the West Midlands.

Hundreds of local enterprises attended events to learn how they could get involved with the Games, in the process gaining mentoring and learning about procurement and other aspects of pitching for major events. Local businesses forged relationships with major suppliers, acting as sub contractors and building links that will now be further developed.

Much of the money remained within the region, a huge part of £400 million of contracts staying in the West Midlands and so being reinvested. The focus on businesses with traditionally under represented leadership further ensuring that all communities saw huge benefit.

This was not an event where outside help came in, enjoyed the big projects and then disappeared, moving on to the next spectacle. Instead it was a Games built in Birmingham, delivered by Birmingham and whose legacy will be within Birmingham.