Satellite of Love? The Perm Sec Doesn’t Think So…
A ”Ministerial Direction” sounds like a very dry and boring aspect of civil service bureaucracy, but that is far from the case. It happens when a government Minister in the […]
Entries by Peter Smith
Want Some Cheap Consulting? How the Big Firms Game the Supplier Selection Processs
Psssttt! Wanna buy a cheap consultant? Top quality, only £20 a day. Or, tell you what, you can have some for a tenner if you like. Yeah. Just £10 a […]
July 2023 – NAO Report Calls Sunak’s Home Insulation Scheme “A Fraudster’s Paradise”
In an unusually hard-hitting report dated July 10th, 2023, the UK’s National Audit Office criticised the home insulation scheme introduced in 2020 by the then-Chancellor, Rishi Sunak. The first problem, […]
Do You Need a Helicopter, Mate? I Can Do You a Deal…
Is that expensive “sea bass” in the restaurant, or that you buy as “Category Manager – Fish” for a frozen food manufacturer – really sea bass? Or is it a […]
Conflicts of Interest – Be Alert !
Conflicts of interest lie behind many cases of procurement corruption and indeed other “corruption” in its widest sense. Often, these are not the highest profile or most serious examples – […]
Spend £5B with Private Hospitals? Hang on a Minute, Treasury says…
We’re seeing so many interesting procurement and supply chain issues during the pandemic, but focus tends to shift week by week. We’ve had the challenge of finding more ventilators, which […]
Public Procurement in the Pandemic – Is it Who You Know, or What You Know?
Yesterday, The Times published a long article looking at how PPE (personal protective equipment) has been supplied to NHS hospitals and other locations during the pandemic. Unlike most articles on […]
Bad Buying to be published in October 2020 by Penguin Business
(From the Penguin website) Organisations large and small spend up to 90% of their budgets on external suppliers of goods and services. Huge amounts of money flow between firms, yet […]
The Chris Grayling Probation Services Farewell Tour Rumbles On ….
The Guardian newspaper reported yesterday: “Ministers are considering renationalising the entire probation service in England and Wales, the Guardian understands, in the latest twist in a long-running saga to unwind […]
Are We Seeing Pandemic-Related Bad Buying?
The pandemic crisis broke just as I was signing off the proof copy for my new book, “Bad Buying – How organizations waste billions through failures, frauds and f*ck-ups“. I […]