The answer’s on a postcard

Did you have a good Easter holiday? We spent ours walking in the hills above Amalfi in the Bay of Naples. We had a great time but that’s not I want to talk about. What made this holiday different was that it was our first experience of being in an organised group.

I’ve always been an independent traveller, but this time my wife put her foot down;  ‘I don’t want to spend a week getting lost or arguing about what to do each day,’ she told me.  So we booked ourselves to join a group holiday and off we went.

And it was better than I’d expected. The holiday company clearly had their marketing sussed as all 15 of us were scarily alike. We were all of a similar age, similar demographic and similar ability to scramble round the rim of Vesuvius without falling in.

It might have been the plentiful supplies of local red wine, but I found myself comparing the company to a council. I worked out from their turnover that the company must spend at least £25m every year on hotels and airlines all round the world. But rather than doing a global deal with one hotel chain, they use small family run independent hotels.

Naturally this makes for a better customer experience. There’s nothing wrong with Novotel, except that wherever you go they’re all very much the same. We stayed in a hotel run by two brothers. The oranges squeezed for our morning juice were grown just up the road and the bread, meat, cheese and wine were also produced locally.

Councils are of course also encouraged to spend locally. Too often though they take the safe procurement path and divest swathes of front line activity to companies like Capita or Serco. Sure they employ local people, but the profit goes out of the area. I don’t know about you, but I’d like my local council to spend all of the money within the community it exists to serve.

Of course the travel company has more incentive to make the effort to buy local. It helps it differentiate its customer offer and I doubt they pay any more in real terms either. But the impact is tangible. The hotelier went beyond the brief to delight the customers, as well as the company that sent them. You could see the impact on the local economy in the enthusiastic way everything was being done.

We all know that localism of this kind makes sense. We know that supporting the small business sector makes for a richer community. Not just financially, but in terms of equality and improved health and wellbeing. People feel better and are better.

So how can we encourage local Government to invest in their own communities and look at the wider impact of that investment? It’s not just about proper procurement but economic development, jobs and environment too.