Surrey Youth Consortium
Some 12 Member organisations within Surrey Youth Focus are contracted to provide services to Surrey CC's Connexions Service through 19 individual contracts. The services are mainly to provide personal advisers to needy young people. This service complements another, much larger contract held by VT (Vosper Thorneycroft) to provide mainstream careers advice to young people in Surrey schools. Both contracts now expire in March 2011.
It seemed self- evident that Surrey CC’s procurement strategy would be likely to reduce the number of contracts, and so this would risk the capability of voluntary organisations to bid for any forthcoming contract, as their reach and resources would be too small to bid for a large, possibly county–wide contract.
So Surrey Youth Focus has facilitated most of the orginal contractors coming together to form Surrey Youth Consortium as a charity , but also a single company limited by guarantee so that in future it can bid for contracts as a single agency.
This follows interesting advice from the Cabinet Office about the advantage of mergers and Consortium (SEE PDF).
The Acting Chairman of Surrey Youth Consortium is Jenny Griffiths to whom any questions should be referred at: griffhobbs@aol.com
