CONTRACT AWARD NOTICE - Community Engagement Services for the Groundwater Resilience and Community Engagement Programme (GRACE)

Buckinghamshire Council is seeking to appoint a provider, or providers, experienced in engaging with the community to deliver community engagement over 4.5 years for the Groundwater Resilience and Community Engagement Programme (GRACE).

Interested organisations should be experienced in engagement with local communities. This can be unrelated to flooding.

This project is funded by Defra as part of the £150 million Flood and Coastal Resilience Innovation Programme which is managed by the Environment Agency to develop and test new approaches to help communities become more resilient to the effects of flooding and climate change.

The aim of the GRACE Programme is, through innovative solutions and stakeholder engagement, to build resilience to groundwater flooding for communities, focusing particularly on 10 at risk geographical areas.

The provider(s) shall devise and carry out effective and true engagement with stakeholders and local communities to help collaborate on, and co-produce, innovative solutions to groundwater flood risk. They will work closely with the Engagement and Communications workstream.

The service specification includes an outline of the Engagement Strategy. The engagement will follow the principles laid out in this strategy: transparency, collaboration, early, evidence based, inclusive and innovative.

The contract term is 4.5 years (4 years and 6 months) with the option to extend for 1 year. The work shall be undertaken in 4 phases, with each phase dependent on the council first issuing formal written instructions at its discretion for the relevant work to be undertaken.

Phase 1 Scoping

Phase 2 Awareness raising and initial engagement

Phase 3 Collaborative engagement

Phase 4 Focused Engagement

An indicative task list is likely to include the following:

• Regular liaison with the Engagement and Communications leads regarding the Community Engagement and Communications workstream.
• Liaison with the workstreams as to the topics that need to be engaged on.
• Aligning engagement activities with those of the Thames Water River Chess Smarter Water Catchment Plan, which is a partner project of the GRACE programme and will be running engagement activities on similar topics, in similar areas with similar stakeholders.
• Attendance at quarterly Community Engagement and Communications Group meetings.
• Developing and maintaining relationships with stakeholders and local communities relevant to chosen Lot.
• Carrying out engagement activities as the need arises and as stakeholders dictate (within reason). These activities could include:

o sharing and collaborating on flood risk mapping;

o listening to communities and feeding back their thoughts;

o eliciting feedback to shape further development of flood maps;

o developing and testing of property flood resilience measures;

o trialling, using and feeding back on new mapping tools/software;

o assisting with the establishment of a flood group if none existent;

o developing new flood plans / improving existing plans;

o assessment of facilities and response capabilities to flooding and identifying routes to improve;

o collaborating to develop natural flood management or sustainable drainage responses to groundwater flooding;

o collaborating in the development of an improved flood warning system for groundwater flooding;

o evaluating the benefits of the programme and working with researchers to measure the improvement to resilience.

• Preparing engagement material that may be required for engagement activities in collaboration with the Communications and Engagement leads.
• Using a variety of online and in person engagement approaches, such as workshop facilitation, citizen juries, telephone interviews, etc
• Identifying engagement opportunities due to local knowledge and local relationships.
• Assisting the engagement lead to identify local stakeholders and community groups that may have been missed during mapping exercises or are hard to reach.
• Logging engagement activities and assessing what worked well or what could have been improved. A system for logging engagement is currently being decided upon by the programme team.
• Liaison with community funding specialist regarding potential fundraising opportunities that have been identified for communities.

Each community has been impacted or is impacted by groundwater flooding. However, each community is unique in their demographics, their flooding situation, their response to flooding, their location, their geography and their circumstances. A strategic approach to engagement has been developed and can be found in the Engagement Strategy, however unique and individual approaches to engagement with the communities is required and expected to reflect the differences and the ethos of the GRACE Programme.

A budget of approximately £15,000 per area has been allocated for Phase 1. Budget will be allocated for each subsequent phase based on outcome, performance and future plan. The estimated maximum contract value per area is £75,000.

Should no proposal or no suitable proposal be submitted for one or more of the Lots, the Council reserves the right to undertake a negotiated procedure without prior publication to provide the services in that Lot but is not committed to doing so. In these circumstances, the initial conditions of contract, including the scope of any such Lot, will not be substantially altered.

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