Collaborative anchor institutions in Preston, Lancashire, United Kingdom

Preston City Council launched an economic development model that incorporated public energy, public pension funds, financial institutions, and anchor institutions. Anchor institutions and local government worked together to leverage their procurement power to support and grow locally owned businesses and cooperatives.

To begin, Preston City Council engaged with anchor institutions based in Preston to build momentum – meeting with leaders and chief executives. Key to these conversations was getting agreement from these anchor institutions to share data about their procurement spend. Next, a baseline understanding of the supply chains of the six anchor institutions that shared their data was established, and the findings collated into an overarching picture.

The aim of the collaboration (carried out through a series of workshops) was to maximise spending. Together, the anchor institutions determined that there was scope to enhance the local spend levels in both the Preston and Lancashire economies and to support local businesses to deliver more goods and services to the anchor institutions.

The six anchor institutions agreed a vision (“a long-term collaborative commitment to community wealth building in Lancashire for influenceable spend”) and six objectives that related to: simplifying procurement processes, reducing levels of spend outside of the region, encouraging local businesses to bid for opportunities, developing the capacity of local businesses to bid, raising awareness of procurement opportunities, and identifying opportunities for cooperative models of delivery.

Since that point, the six anchor institutions started working on meeting those objectives (through activities such as revising their individual and collective commissioning and procurement strategies) and maximising their spend in the Preston and Lancashire economies.