Our City Our Future Debate - and procurement

Last night was the Our City Our Future Debate (which has previously been called the State of the City Debate). The attendees were a mix of councillors and council officers, representatives from partners, representatives from some community organisations, young people from the Schools Parliament etc. We were looking at Sustainable Development and the Credit Crunch. A very interesting short talk by Eric Bichard in the plenary. I went to the workshop on economic development. Procurement kept coming up and I mentioned that I had been asked to lead on setting up a procurement group of members within the council to have a look at what we are doing and what we could do better. This is clearly a massive job so we may have to split it up and take things one issue at a time if we are going to get anywhere. Anyway today I have been sending e mails to get the group set up and hopefully we'll start work soon.