To waiver the tender process for a Committee Management System (CMS) & extend the current contract with the supplier ‘Civica Ltd’ for the Modern.Gov system on a 3 year contract.

To ensure that the Council has in place the most suitable Committee Management System in order to meet statutory deadlines of notice and to efficiently administer various committees & panels in order for them to make executive decisions within statutory time frames.

Award the CMS contract to an alternative provider - This would be a resource heavy cost, with the financial cost and officer time taken for data migration being a key factor in this. Numerous features would also be lost, that only Civica’s CMS can offer, which would have a negative impact on residents, officers and Councillors. The Council’s current AV system would also not be compatible with a new provider and therefore incur configuration costs to synch with an alternative (which is currently not offered by the provider)

Do Nothing - All future decision making records and functions would need to be manually created using Office 365 and provided to the website team for publication to RBWM’s website. This would place greater burden on an already small team to manage this statutory process, which would also see a duplication of Council resources. This could put the Council at risk of not meeting its statutory deadlines of notices for Council meetings amongst other things as detailed within Appendix A, which could in turn cause significant financial harm.

Ending contract – ceasing ability to use CMS system to distribute meeting information. Proposed mitigation - Utilise email groups to distribute notices, reports and meeting logistics.

Ending contract – publication of notices and agendas. Proposed mitigation - Prioritise high profile committees over other bodies that are administered by the Council.

The current cost of the contract has increased due to the current economic climate. Market research that has been undertaken, confirmed that the contract being pursued, still offered best value for the Council.

Due to commercial sensitivity, the full financial details have not been published.

Approval was also granted by the Spending Review Panel on Friday 27 October 2023 to proceed with the commitment of spending outlined below.

Rina Sandhu
31 October 2023

Elaine Browne
20 October 2023

Climate change/sustainability. If no CMS contract is in place for the ‘go live’ date of 1 December 2023 and proposed mitigations are unsuccessful there is a risk to sustainability. If alternative online and digital functionality are not implemented then hardcopy resources would potentially need to be printed and made available to the public, residents and officers.

Data Protection/GDPR. If an alternative provider was to be chosen, then large amounts of personal data would need to be transferred from the current CMS to the new one. This would involve the assistance of the Council’s IT team. The Council’s privacy notices would also need to be amended.

The CMS currently holds various levels of personal information. In the event of there being no CMS, this would have to be held on a word document or email, via personal users shared folders. This would be less secure than the secure servers of the CMS.

In order to comply with any requirement of the Contract and Tendering Procedure Rules set out in Part 8A of the Council’s Constitution