Contract Renewal - Provision Of Contingent Staff (Labour Hire)

Karen Finzel0:00

Good afternoon, my apologies, to the Services & Organisation Committee Meeting Tuesday the 11th of February 2025. I'd like to acknowledge the elders and Kabi Kabi past, present and emerging and like to express my appreciation of the inherent knowledge and cultural understanding and connection to our waters, land and sea. So thank you everybody and today noting we have all Councillors in attendance and in the gallery we have Councillor Tom Wegener. We have apologies from Cr Frank Wilkie who is our very important business overseas. Is that all we've got? Yes. Fantastic, thank you. So now we've done attendance and apologies. I'm seeking a confirmation of the Minutes. Do we have someone to move that? I'll move it. Thank you. That's moved by Councillor Phillips and seconded by Councillor. Wilson, thank you that. You for that. I will take that to the vote. All in favour? Yes, that's unanimous. Thank you. We have no presentations, no deputations. And we have before us reports for consideration for the committee. We have item number 7.1, the contract renewal, provision of contingent staff labour hire, and we've got Council staff. The reporting. The report written is by written by Diana Stewart, who's going to give us a brief overview.

Thank you, Councillors. This report that is presented to you today is in relation to awarding a procurement ensure the provision of contingent staff or labour hire for Council. So by way of background, Council engages, as you know, a labour hire workforce as part of its overall resourcing model to fill our resourcing needs. And in particular, it allows us the flexibility to scale. Our workforce quickly and access specialised skills when we need it to manage fluctuating demands. It's important to note that our labour hire workforce is a critical component in supporting Council to deliver services to community. So within this resourcing model we have a current contract with Comensura our labour hire provider that is due to expire on the 28th of February of this year. This contractual arrangement has been established under our local government local by arrangement scheme. Prior to engaging with the Comensura our sourcing of contingent workforce was ineffective as teams spent substantial time trying to engage labour hire staff with individual recruitment firms directly so essentially what we had was a decentralised engagement model that was inefficient. So it's moving to a vendor neutral managed service provider such as Comensura we have achieved great efficiencies and speed in sourcing engaging and onboarding workers in response to councils. Specific needs. Essentially the service provider does a large part of the administrative work for Council in managing the various recruitment firms on offer and offering us suitable candidates for our consideration. So whilst our labour hire workforce is not extensive in size, performance data from 2021 to 2024 shows a steady uptake of contingent workers across Council primarily focused in technical and specialised roles with a total order value spend for that period of approximately 2.28 million. So within this context a procurement panel was recently established, assembled consisting of staff from people culture branch, governance branch and procurement team which reviewed Comensura's new proposal to Council and concluded that it was deemed to satisfy the sound contracting principles by being a value for money proposal, coupled with a strong performance, experience and ability to continue to offer us innovative and collaborative labour hire solutions. We also note that Comensura are a leading vendor neutral service program provider with extensive reach into our Sunshine Coast labour market and equally council's experience with them has been very very positive with the provider offering us a friendly, efficient and expeditious our customer experience. So overall the panel considered various risks and opportunities in this process and deemed that by continuing to engage Comensura for a further period it would allow Council to explore long-term other potential supplier options in a planned manner should it choose to that aligns to its future long-term resourcing goals. So I hope that gives you a summary.