Adult training axed to avoid court fights, authority admits

Skills training contracts targeted at some of West Yorkshire’s most needy people were ditched last month to “minimise the risk” of legal challenges after a botched procurement process, FE Week has learned.

West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA) took the rare step of abandoning its £7 million adult skills fund (ASF) tender in late August.

The authority, which controls a £67 million devolved adult education budget, has now revealed it will re-run the procurement, with the aim of starting contracts in January, as any potential legal challenges could cause even longer delays.

“This will allow all issues with the previous procurement to be addressed and any loopholes closed,” the authority wrote in a briefing to local politicians seen by FE Week.

“It will also help us to reset the relationship with bidders and minimise the risk of legal challenge.”

Issues with the way the procurement process was run surfaced in June when WYCA decided to re-evaluate bids, claiming that providers had raised concerns about “perceived or potential errors” with its scoring methodology.

However, the results of the second round of evaluation meant two providers who won in the first round were replaced with two who had originally lost out.

WYCA, led by Labour metro mayor Tracy Brabin, said this “inadvertently undermined confidence in the procurement” and meant continuing with the awards, with the “high” risk of delays from legal challenges, would not be “expedient or in the public interest”.

Some providers are also understood to have questioned whether the authority’s rules over bids from separate companies with the same owner were correctly applied.

Providers who spoke to FE Week said they had never experienced procurement evaluations being re-wound or re-run.

Impacting the poorest?

The loss of training is likely to impact some of the region’s most needy people, including the unemployed and low paid.

The adult education budget, now rebranded as the ASF, is currently devolved to 10 mayoral authorities and aims to help adults – particularly those on low salaries – increase their skills and achieve the equivalent of GCSE and A-level qualifications.

Through the fund, unemployed learners would be referred to basic skills courses via return-to-work schemes such as the sector-based work academy programme.

Other training should have helped those in lower-paid jobs gain digital, social care, construction or warehousing skills.

Around £60 million of WYCA’s ASF cash is distributed to colleges and local authorities as grant-funded contractors, while the remainder is dished out to private training providers through tenders.

The region’s largest city, Leeds, is already facing a “capacity crisis” in further education, with a lack of spaces for 16 to 18-year-old students due to a “perfect storm” of a lack of strategic planning, limited capacity and growing numbers of young people.

A WYCA spokesperson said that while the delay to commissioning was “highly regrettable”, the contracts accounted for only 10 per cent of its total provision.

They added: “Agreements held with colleges, local authorities, wider grant holders and our responsiveness contracts – those designed to address the most acute shortages in the regional labour market – remain unaffected.”

The authority said it was “rapidly assessing” options to fill the gap by “flex[ing]” existing contracts, but exact plans are yet to be confirmed.

‘an absolute shower’

The impact of contracts being cancelled at the last minute is likely to impact the business of some providers who had hired staff and started enrolling students.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, one provider called the contracting mishap “an absolute shower” while another said many would begin “planning for redundancies”.

WYCA said it had always been explicit that award letters to contractors “did not constitute a contract” and that any work carried out before the contract was awarded was taken “at providers’ own risk”.