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Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity Begins

A group of Indo-Pacific nations has banded together to begin the process of developing an Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity. This framework is intended to advance resilience, sustainability, inclusiveness, economic growth, fairness, and competitiveness amongst participating nations. The countries taking part include the United States, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, India, Indonesia, Japan, Republic of Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, ...

Stormy Times For Meteorological Procurement

The UK government faces trial in the High Court over its award of an £854 million contract for a new Meteorological Office IT system, according to the Financial Times. The court case has arisen from accusations by ATOS, the French multinational information technology service and consulting company who are suing the Meteorological Office and Department of Business ...

UK Left Waiting On Transparency

The UK’s latest procurement bill promises much, but many of the technical details remain to be defined. The drafting of the procurement bill matches many of the trailed promises featured in the consultation, but some of those promises, notably those around transparency remain undefined. That’s not to say that they won’t be there, rather that they’re not ...

Empty Fishing Lakes.

We’ve written before about frameworks, but some improved analysis from our brilliant data team made us think it was time to revisit the issue. Using frameworks should lead to fewer tenders and more efficiency, but if there are too many, the promised efficiency improvements never materialise and suppliers can end up bidding into a tender that has ...

Collaborative Procurement For The Construction Industry

The Centre for Built Britain has released a white paper on Procurement Strategies for incentivising collaborative delivery, which explores how a collaborative approach to procurement can help to deliver projects better, faster, greener, and safer with a focus on net-zero targets and building safety. The paper invites clients and industry to examine and adopt their Integrated Information ...

MoD £2 Billion in Nuclear Contracts.

Britain's Ministry of Defence announced this week that over £2 billion worth of defence contracts have been awarded to start the third phase of its submarine nuclear deterrent programme termed 'Dreadnought'. London-listed companies, BAE systems (BAES.L) and Rolls-Royce (RR.L), have received the contracts, the MoD said in a statement, adding that the investment was part of a planned £10 ...

Measuring Sustainable Public Procurement

One of the projects we are most proud of is working with The Open Contracting Partnership to create a Sustainable Public Procurement (SPP) toolkit. The toolkit provides practical insights for the day-to-day needs of procurement professionals on adopting and measuring sustainable procurement.In this article we look at measuring sustainable public procurement. What is 'sustainable public procurement' uptake? Sustainable ...

New Support For Canadian SME Traders.

The Government of Canada recently released its 2022 Federal Budget. Within it was an announcement of an intention to establish a Trade Remedy Counselling unit (TRC) to improve access to Canada’s trade remedy system for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Canadian producers can use the trade remedy system to request an investigation against specific countries whose exporters ...

Progressive Procurement Yields Results

Last year, we shared the results of the landmark Aboriginal Procurement policy (APP), first introduced by Western Australia’s Premier, Mark MacGowan in 2018. The objective of the policy was to improve outcomes for Aboriginal businesses in the state, with targeted measures to increase contract awards, and therefore, economic benefit to the community. The Aboriginal Procurement Policy Third ...

Cutting Carbon Is A Procurement Issue

Just a few months ago, we shared an article on findings by the Boston Consulting Group and the World Economic Forum that showed procurement is responsible for 15% of all greenhouse gas emissions, globally. Their study reported that governments spend $11trillion(USD) annually-or 15% of global GDP, on procurement every year. Our own prior study, tracked the value of global ...

OECD: Promoting Gender Equality Through Procurement

COVID-19 showed that women have been disproportionately affected by the economic and social fallout from the pandemic(OECD, 2020), as the pandemic exacerbated existing structural inequalities and gender norms (United Nations, 2020). We know that public procurement can directly affect the quality of life and well-being of citizens through government procurement strategies, practices, and systems. Through gender-responsive public ...

Progress In The Open Government National Action Plan

We’ve been working closely with The Cabinet Office to develop and refine a robust and repeatable methodology for the identification and matching of tenders, as part of the Open Government National Action Plan. The Cabinet Office has also been working with central government departments to monitor performance on the completeness of publication of award notices as well ...

Analysis Is A Service.

Understanding a market or a phenomenon has to account for when something happened. If you build an analysis that says 20% of records were published with missing data, the inevitable next question is “how do we put that into context”? In other words, is 20% bad or good? That will mean conducting the same analysis at a different time. ...

Consultants Still Winning Huge Government Contracts.

Consultancies have won contracts worth more than £700m from UK government in Covid related contracts since the start of the pandemic in 2020. Concerningly, many of the contracts were awarded without competitive tender. The Financial Times has previously reported on Whitehall departments facing criticism for a “worrying lack of transparency” over many of the deals, which include supporting ...

Two Solutions To A Hard Problem

In our last post, I suggested that public procurement has a big problem: an inability to account for, or record failure. Today I’m going to suggest a possible solution. One that would provide the sort of insight that we can use to understand contract failures in procurement. We’re proposing two initiatives: In addition to what we would consider ...

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