London Legal Support Trust offering discount stationery for London advice agencies

As a grant funder, London Legal Support Trust (LLST) wants to help those they support financially to try and minimise their costs as much as possible so that their funds go as far as they can. To this end, they took a selection of London legal advice centres’ stationery prices, took the lowest common denominator for each, and approached stationery companies asking for their best deal if they began buying as a group.

They managed to get overall reduced prices that saved those who contributed the initial prices anywhere between 15 – 70%. As you can imagine, they thought this was therefore worth pursuing. Basically, the way it works is that an agency signs up with them as being interested, they are provided with an agreement that says their contract with the supplier in terms of liability, invoicing, ordering and delivery acts as if they were just dealing with them solely.

However, the difference is that the orders are then counted with all of the others in the group to make the quantities larger and so make it possible to get greater discounts overall. They will meet with the account manager once every quarter and negotiate lower prices on the products that are most often ordered. LLST do not make any money from the arrangement, it is purely for the benefit of organisations working in the advice sector.

They have a standard base list of products, which are at the best price they know of currently, but if your organisation has lower, they can also use this to bring down the cost for everyone in the group. They can also add products as needed. There is no minimum spend or pressure to buy, the idea is just that combined, their buying power is a lot greater than alone.

If you are an advice service in London and are interested in this scheme, please let Natalia Rymaszewska know (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) and she can send over the agreement to look over as well as the price list (the exact details of which have to be confidential within the group).