Archive

-Fiona Hunt As my colleague Ian wrote this week, governments are increasingly looking to procurement to deliver better social outcomes. President Biden began his term in office by implementing new rules in US government procurement around these very outcomes. These executive orders focus on local economic development and reducing carbon, both present significant challenges for the procurement ...

While 2020 was an incredibly rocky road for many businesses globally, in public procurement it was SMEs in particular who lost out, both in terms of number of government contracts awarded to SMEs and the value of those contracts. Worse still, this appears to be a trend in public procurement outside of the effects of Covid, ...

We recently completed a study of European government procurement changes in the three years up to and including 2020, to assess the impacts of Covid. In the process of our work, one area of focus has been a year on year calculation of the number of bids per tender, across all Europe. Analysing the data has highlighted ...

Public sector organisations have, according to guidance, thirty days to publish details of their contracts online. So, thirty days after a contract there should be a public notice with some key details about the contract online. Our analysis shows that on average, just three departments met the thirty day guideline in 2020. In 2019, just two departments ...

There is increased scrutiny for the suppliers of food boxes provided to the chronically ill and those asked to shelter through the Covid pandemic, and a number of high profile individuals have started to question the lack of quantity of goods and nutritional value within the 4,724,611 boxes that have been delivered through the food box ...

Yesterday defence Defence Minister Jeremy Quin announced a £550 million contract was awarded for new surge-attack missile The contract award promises 'hundreds of UK jobs' as well as 'unrivalled lethality' for the UK's lightening jets. “The development of this next-generation missile will allow us to protect our personnel and assets on the ground, from thousands of metres in ...

-Ian Makgill, Founder Spend Network Just before Christmas, DXC (formerly Hewlett Packard) was awarded a contract for £430,000 by the Business Services Organisation for on going support of EPES system, the rationale for the contract award was as follows: Without EPES the monthly annual payments to the independent contractors of some GBP 700 million per annum cannot be ...

Our New Solution To Classification In 2020, we developed an advanced classifier. This tool adds multiple labels to procurement notices based on the Common Procurement Vocabulary (CPV), with an accuracy of 84%. This classifier gives notices five scored, Level 3 CPV codes based on their text and description, that work for the 90 languages in our database. ...

Sadly, we don't have to look far to find examples of suppliers being accused of illegality. The Grenfell enquiry heard evidence that suppliers sold products that they knew "were dangerous to life" . McKinsey is being asked by a parliamentary committee in South Africa to answer for payments made to a firm controlled by the Guptas, ...

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 ...

The UK government yesterday launched a green paper, a series of proposed changes to procurement rules, purporting to put transparency and increased community value at the centre of its new approach. Certainly 2020 has seen the Government come under significant scrutiny in it's procurement processes, with a litany of ineffective contracts awarded in the emergency response to ...

It is always encouraging to see government procurement transparency improving around the world. Brazil and Cote d'Ivoire have both recently applied to the GPA, Agreement on Government Procurement, a plurilateral agreement of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The agreement regulates the procurement of goods and services, based on the principles of openness, transparency and non-discrimination. Adopting the GPA ...

The NAO has just published a report criticising the Government for using a 'fast-lane', where suppliers that were known to MPs were prioritised for public contracts for protective equipment, often at high values. It isn't hard to see why this is a problem. Good suppliers with a history of supplying PPE were overlooked in favour of suppliers ...