Purpose

The service will offer additional capacity and specialist support to local authorities when engaging with communities at risk of flooding, helping to strengthen resilience and improve outcomes. Furthermore, the Programme Manager, acting as the Greater Manchester RFCC Partnership Lead, sits on the Steering Group overseeing the delivery of the North West Community Flood Resilience Engagement Support Service. This provides a direct opportunity to influence the programme and ensure that the benefits of the service are maximised for Greater Manchester and the wider North West region.

Following an Open competitive procurement process, Newground CIC was the highest scoring bidder. The procurement process took into account suppliers’ experience of working with communities, experience of programme delivery, cultural competence, proposal for delivery, social value and pricing.

Decision

1. The acceptance of a Grant of £ £1,099,914 from the Environment Agency for the purpose of facilitating the procurement of North west community flood resilience engagement support services be approved; and
   2. The award of the North West community flood resilience engagement support services contract to Newground CIC be approved.
   
   

Alternative options considered

This project will deliver benefits across all partnerships within the North West RFCC region, including Greater Manchester. As the most well-established Combined Authority in the region, GMCA is particularly well placed to procure and manage this service on behalf of North West partners, providing a coordinated and efficient approach.

The GMCA could choose not to accept the grant and not to award the contract. However, this is not felt to be desirable.

If this service is not procured, then community engagement to address flood risk would rely solely on very limited Local Authority and Environment Agency resources. The Flood Hub, which supports this engagement, would not be able to able to continue to be developed and maintained and is an essential “one stop shop” for flood information to the public.

The Flood Hub website has grown in recent years and has an established following demonstrating increasing engagement with the subject of flood resilience as something that people are concerned about.

Without this platform opportunities to raise awareness and drive behaviour change will not be available.

This service also provides an independent 3rd party without which it would be more challenging to engage and build trusted effective relationships. The opportunity would also be lost because community information needs to drive the creation of new content for the website.

Long-term opportunities to strengthen regional consistency and share good practice would also be lost. Over time, partner engagement may decline, and the ability to respond to increasing flood risk and climate pressures would be significantly reduced.

This approach of procuring this service strengthens trust, increases buy in from partners, and ensures the Hub remains relevant, accessible and widely used. It maximises the value of The Flood Hub as both a digital platform and an engagement tool, supporting long-term collaboration, consistent messaging and meaningful action to improve flood resilience across the region.

As a key partner in the work of the NW Flood Hub, the GMCA is best placed to receive and process the grant on behalf of the Environment Agency to ensure continuity of a regionally funded service.