The Minister for Public Procurement Speaks!

Yes, as we’re into the UK election campaign now, articles for the next few weeks may well have a political theme I’m afraid.

Alex Burghart has been in his role for 18 months, which given the turnover in the “UK Minister for Public Procurement” role over the previous few years is a positive. He is a teacher and academic by background, with a PhD in History, who then became a political adviser. So no business experience, but a clever guy, clearly. He spoke at the Procurex National event in Liverpool last month, and his speech is now up on the Cabinet Office website. So first of all, let’s give him credit for showing up and also to Procurex for getting him to attend. Let’s have a look at some of his comments on the new UK public procurement regulations, due to come in to force in October, with my comments on various of his remarks.

“And at the heart of this is ensuring more transparency than ever before, so that we’re spending taxpayers’ money in a way that can be properly scrutinised”.

Rather oddly, that is about all he says in terms of transparency, which is actually one of the biggest changes in the Regulations, with a host of new requirements for buyers. I’m in favour of more transparency but I do worry about the workload burden for already stretched organisations.

“A new duty will require any contracting authority to consider SMEs, to take account of their unique challenges, and we have introduced 30-day payment terms on a broader range of contracts, in response to what SMEs asked us to do”.

“Consider” SMEs does not of course mean using them. I’ve written many times before about the daft SME target for government spend and indeed I do not really see why we support SMEs rather than social enterprises, minority owned firms, local firms, innovative start-ups… The answer is political of course.  So we’ll see whether the Act has any impact on public procurement SME spend – I have my doubts.

“We’re also creating a new central digital platform for suppliers to register and store their details, so that they can be used for multiple bids, and enable them to see all the opportunities in one place”.

Yes, good idea, Sally Collier and I proposed this in 2009 when I was working in government. But given the track record of government developing new platforms, I’ve got my fingers crossed for this one.

“It puts a requirement on public bodies to provide feedback on bids, giving you greater consistency of feedback, helping you shape your next bid”.

This is one of a couple of rather odd or misleading statements from Burghart. There has been a requirement to provide feedback for as long as I can remember and indeed, there are some concerns that the new requirements may lead to less useful feedback. But we’ll have to see how that pans out. Not new or radical though in any sense.

“We are making value for money a core part of our process – ensuring that all contracting authorities must place value for money at the forefront of all procurement activities”.

So what were we basing our procurement decisions on up to now? It seems odd, particularly for a party that has been in charge for 14 years, to suggest that public procurement hasn’t been based on value for money up to now!  But it has, this is just nonsense, unless I’m missing something.

But, perhaps most importantly, we are also going to create a register, accessible to all public sector organisations, that will list suppliers who must – or may – be excluded from contracts.

This is clearly NOT the most important aspect of the new regulations. (I would say that the flexibility to design new procurement processes, which he didn’t really mention, and the transparency rules are the most important).  It is to be welcomed, but benefits will be limited and the proof will be in the implementation. I will be amazed if there are more than a handful – literally – of suppliers on this list by the end of 2025, let’s say. It is well-meaning but will prove very difficult to implement.

A new National Security Unit for procurement in the Cabinet Office will review suppliers for potential risk to our national security in a way never achieved before. It will also conduct investigations and make debarment recommendations to Ministers alongside the Procurement Review Unit, which will do the same for other exclusion grounds.

That sounds good but again let’s see if it actually has any real effect.

Not a bad speech then, all in all, but assuming there isn’t a miracle on July 4th, the Tories will be blaming Labour for “not implementing the new regulations properly” if it all proves to be a disappointment. Burghart has what looks like a very safe seat, even with the predicted swings, so he may well still be around to comment anyway. Indeed, he might be Leader of the Opposition the way things are going.