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Lollipop chart showing time taken to publish contract award notices

How Long Does It Take A Department To Publish A Contract Notice?

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 ...

Controversial Food Box Contractors Face Scrutiny

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 ...

£550 Million Missile Contract Signed.

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 ...

Time To Build More Open Products For Government

-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 ...

New Year, New Tool. Introducing Our New Classifier.

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. ...
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The buyers that spoiled Christmas 2020

Welcome to our annual run down of the buyers that are most likely to spread misery for suppliers at Christmas. Here are the buyers that are publishing tenders that require a supplier to respond either in the last days before Christmas or within the first working week of January. This year, the British Council has pipped DEFRA ...
Envelope containing letter about Covid from Government

Why Blacklisting Is Harder Than You Think.

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, ...
Laptop, coffee and notepad

Build Back Younger?

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 Palace of Westminster, taken from the South Bank

UK Government Launches Plans To Transform Procurement.

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 ...
World trade organization building

More Governments Improve Transparency.

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 ...

Life in The Fast Lane

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 ...
Wooden blocks spelling out 'VALUE'

Adding Value

We're analysts. We work with data, every day. We know what works and what doesn't work. We know about values that can't be summed, documents that are hard to find and buyers that use thirty or forty different versions of their name. We build data points that can be used. Our work isn't just about gathering all the data we ...
Details of a spreadsheet with categorisation

Algorithms That Are Better Than Humans

Categorisation is about making it easier to find opportunities. Getting it right means being better than humans. For it be really useful, we have to be able to take source documents and, where necessary improve on the categorisation provided by the publisher. If a publisher gives us a record that is classified as construction, that is useful, but if ...
Soldier on haunches receiving orders

Goodbye Defence Contracts Online

The Chief Commercial Officer of the Ministry of Defence has published details of planned changes to Defence Contracts Online. You can see his letter here. The planned replacement, Defence Sourcing Portal, is due to go live in January 2021, with Defence Contracts Online closing at some point during the second quarter of 2021. We will not lament the ...
Soldiers loading PPE into the back of an aeroplane

High priorities in PPE lead to missed opportunities

The NAO has just published a report criticising the government for using a 'high priority lane' where suppliers that were known to MPs were prioritised for public contracts for protective equipment, often at high values. Thread follows. https://www.nao.org.uk/report/government-procurement-during-the-covid-19-pandemic/ It isn't hard to see why this is a problem, good suppliers with a history of supplying PPE were ...

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