Stockton Council handed out over £17m worth of contracts without following its own rules
Stockton Council has handed out more than £17m worth of contracts without following its own rules, it has been revealed.
Stockton Council has handed out more than £17m worth of contracts without following its own rules, it has been revealed.
The authority awarded 102 contracts, to a value of £17.3m, in cases where it made exceptions to its rules about competition, quotes and tenders in the last 18 months. The council can decide not to follow its rules and make exceptions for good reasons, like urgent works.
But the multi-million-pound scale of the spend surprised a leading council officer. Martin Skipsey, assistant director for procurement and governance, told councillors: “We’ve never really aggregated those up to a value, and it’s come as a bit of a surprise, actually.
“£17m, we didn’t think it would be that high. We’ll continue to monitor that figure,” he told the council’s people select committee, which is reviewing procurement and tendering.
In construction, of 91 contracts worth almost £77.3m from 2025 to date, nearly £60m were from competition, inviting quotes from companies or advertising for tenders to the market: “The bulk of our construction expenditure is going through the competitive process and I think it’s important to note that. There is a significant amount that has gone through the right route where we’ve sought competitive pricing.”
The rest – £17.4m worth of contracts – were £14.6m awarded directly without competition, although with “some assurance” under an existing agreement, and £2.8m under exceptions to the rules like urgent fire door replacements. Mr Skipsey said: “Some of them make sense. Some of them are urgency, we’ve needed to just get someone on site to fix a problem.
“Again, that’s much higher than I expected. It’s difficult to demonstrate value for money for that because we haven’t been through a competitive procedure. However we would have had the experts look at price, challenge the price and work with those construction companies.
“I think it’s an area the committee might want to look a little bit further into because that it certainly higher than I expected it to be,” he suggested on Monday, October 5. “The committee might want to do a bit further digging into that beyond today.”
Committee vice chair Councillor Paul Weston pointed to the 28 construction contracts worth £2.8m awarded under exceptions: “It’s more than a few fire doors. Not to have some kind of pricing, some kind of competitive tender, it’s something to be looked at.”
Mr Skipsey explained why exceptions might be made: “This is where we decide we’re not going to follow our normal rules around going out to quote or to tender or using framework agreements, and we go direct to someone. There’s a number of reasons where we say that’s appropriate to do that.”
Some 51 contracts worth over £12m covered situations where “for technical or artistic reasons, or for reasons connected with the protection of exclusive rights, the contract may be awarded only to a particular third party”, with 11 more contracts including such situations.
Mr Skipsey said this could cover a case where the council was buying an artwork and could not go somewhere else for it. But he said: “There’s a considerable amount, a considerable number of contracts which have been awarded. It’s quite a significant amount that’s gone through that particular route.”
In cases of urgency, he said, taking the time to follow the rules “would be prejudicial to the council’s interests”. But the rules say this “only if it is strictly necessary” and the council still has to consider following the process in parts, particularly when it comes to competition.
Mr Skipsey said: “We can bypass our rules under urgency. But we should apply our rules where we possibly can in that process.
“We are strengthening those controls all of the time to try and make this more robust. Any of these decisions have to be documented, it goes all the way to a director to agree that.
“We’re trying to create enough time for the director to be able to agree that with options to go forward. We’re trying to be better at managing that process.
“Even though there’s an exception or direct award, it will have gone through the professionals to make a judgment. But I acknowledge that’s not the same as full competition.
“There are quite a lot of direct awards. A price has just been provided by one supplier. Our professional architects and quantity surveyors do scrutinise that to make sure it’s reasonable, I suppose, and in line with price benchmarks.”
Other exceptions included pilot projects, “personal social services” such as residential care and community support packages, and temporary contracts of undetermined length because of funding uncertainty.
In the last two years, 124 contracts were worth over £500,000 so they had to go to the council’s cabinet to approve. Another 437 contracts, worth up to £100,000, and 244 contracts worth between £100,000 and £500,000, were decided by council officers.
Mr Skipsey agreed with Cllr Weston that if the council dropped the threshold from £500,000 to £100,000 for contracts needing to go to cabinet for a decision, it would not make a “huge amount” of work.