Procurement / By / January 31, 2021 / 2 minutes of reading

Build Back Younger?

January 31, 2021
Procurement

Joe Biden’s exhortation to ‘build back better’, which has also been used by Boris Johnson, is broadly equivalent to the more arch comment that Winston Churchill made during the war: “never let a good crisis go to waste.”

Governments looking to reinvigorate their economies should consider their procurement spend as one of their critical tools. Governments typically spend around 12% of GDP in public contracting, a vast amount of spend that is directly in their control.

To drive growth, governments should be making sure that as many contracts as possible go to firms that can create jobs, rather than firms that will just absorb the spend without growing.

Downturns create entrepreneurs, many of which start up after being laid off from their employer, but new companies are anathema to Government, considered to be too risky to trade with they are often excluded because of their lack of financial history.

Those without experience find bidding too complex and burdensome, whilst others struggle to get these companies into the government supply chain.

However, young companies are our primary source of innovation and have the greatest potential for growth; the pandemic has shown that contracts worth millions for critical equipment can go to small, new companies when government wants it to happen.

We just need to recalibrate the priorities for government procurement, so that we can genuinely build back better.

This means reappraising how they attract suppliers when letting contracts. Every avenue should be explored; reducing the complexity of bids, increasing the number of lots, targeting companies with growth potential, allowing for quick and easy access to framework agreements and partnering with innovative companies.

So pay close attention to who wins new contracts in the future, it could well be a measure of how determined a government is to build back better, or instead to just to settle back into the usual way of working.

We can help governments to measure the success of their procurement regimes, from economic growth to savings and beyond, if you’d like to know more about our procurement data services, please get in touch.

 

 

May 12, 2022

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...
Read more...
May 10, 2022

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...
Read more...
April 29, 2022

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...
Read more...
April 29, 2022

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...
Read more...
April 26, 2022

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[1]), as the pandemic exacerbated...
Read more...
April 21, 2022

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...
Read more...
April 19, 2022

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...
Read more...
April 14, 2022

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...
Read more...
April 12, 2022

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...
Read more...
April 7, 2022

Public Procurement Has A Big Problem

The world has changed. We live in a world where commerce, industry, and work are powered by data. Performance is measured and...
Read more...
April 5, 2022

Ukrainian Invasion & UK Procurement

Last week, the UK Government released a Procurement Policy Note (PPN) that sets out how contracting authorities can further cut ties with...
Read more...
March 29, 2022

Aviation Procurement Inquiry

The Defence Committee, made up of a number of MP’s appointed by the House of Commons to examine the expenditure, administration, and...
Read more...
March 22, 2022

Solving Search

Search is difficult. By that we mean building a service that delivers the right information to people who are searching for it....
Read more...
March 15, 2022

EU Medical Procurement Recommendations

The European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) has released a paper that examines procurement practices across the EU in their...
Read more...
March 10, 2022

You Can Shove Our Data……

Right into the heart of your business. That’s right, we want you to put our data in your own database. We don’t...
Read more...

Newsletter

Compelling research, insights and data directly into your inbox.

Recent media stories

Search

Recent articles

Scroll to Top