2022 – How Was It For You, CIPS?
The CIPS 2022 report and accounts are available now – and it was a difficult year for the Institute.
Entries by Peter Smith
Why Isn’t Competition Working in the UK Petrol Market?
Why are prices so high in many countries, including the UK? Global forces and events are part of it, but there is increasing evidence that firms providing goods and services […]
PPE Dumped – An Unhappy Reminder
There was an unhappy reminder of the pandemic and the PPE Bad Buying saga recently when several hundred pallets of PPE (mainly aprons, it seems) were discovered apparently dumped in […]
Waste in Woking – Taxpayers will Pick up the Bill
Woking’s council has made disastrous property investments and taxpayers now face losses of hundreds of millions.
Disqualifying Suppliers from Government Contracts
It feels like the new UK Procurement Bill has been moving through Parliament for years – it is only a year in fact, although before that there was an extended […]
Twelve Tips for Presenting to a Procurement Audience
If you are speaking to a procurement conference audience in a sales / marketing capacity, you need to seize the opportunity – here are some tips to help.
Huge Ship, Tiny Error, Major Problem
Picture: LPhot Alex Ceolin, UK MOD© Crown copyright 2019 You may know the expression “don’t spoil the ship for a ha’pworth of tar*”, but we have a case now where […]
TSB Systems and Contracting Failure- CIO Fined
In my Bad Buying book, I wrote about the IT disaster that affected millions of TSB bank customers back in 2018. Here is the story from the book. “In 2015 […]
An Interesting Fraud – – Maybe Bad Supplying Rather then Bad Buying?
There are a number of very common procurement frauds; well covered of course in the Bad Buying book. “Inside jobs” based around a corrupt employee take a number of forms […]
Local Government Elections – Can We Stop Corruption and Incompetence?
There are local elections in England this week – but we are seeing more cases of corruotion and incompetence in local governemtn, with huge amounts of the taxpayers’ money wasted.