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The Cabinet Office recently published a new policy paper entitled “Transforming Public Procurement – our transparency ambition”. This policy paper builds upon the Green Paper: Transforming Public Procurement, the follow-up consultation and more recently the Procurement Bill.
The policy paper is broken down into six chapters, exploring how the government wants to expand upon the information it reports on to further improve their procurement transparency.
Government’s Vision
The goal of the Government is to create a transparent public procurement system that everyone from citizens to minsters, SME’s and large corporations can view, search and understand where and with whom public money is being spent.
By delivering this digital platform, the government hopes to create and open opportunities to small businesses across the UK and therefore deliver better procurement outcomes, value for money, collaboration, innovation and identify cost savings within their overarching procurement strategy.
Government’s Achievements to Date
There are number of ways in which the public sector currently provides procurement transparency.
- Find a Tender – 1st January 2021 the UK Government launched Find a Tender where suppliers can search and apply for high value contracts, usually above £118,000.
- Contract Finder – is used to publish opportunities over £10,000, it allows suppliers to search in different sectors, by CPV codes and region.
- Local government bodies are required to publish details of contracts over £5,000 into a ‘contracts register’, usually found within their own website.
- Central government departments must publish their procurement pipelines, e.g. DIO, UKAEA, Home Office.
- Central government and NHS bodies publish transactions over £25k onto data.gov.uk or their own websites.
- Local government and police publish transactions over £500, including payments through contracts onto data.gov.uk or their own websites.
- Central government departments are required to report KPIs from their most important contracts on a quarterly basis.
The current landscape of Procurement
Through the above systems and change, it has allowed more transparency within public sector procurement whilst providing opportunities for SMEs. However, with the data spread across multiple platforms, portals, and little to no information beyond the contract award stage, the Cabinet Office hopes by bringing together all this data all stakeholders involved will get a full, accurate and ultimately transparent picture of the procurement landscape.
Procurement Transparency Reforms
The Cabinet Office outlines three core procurement reforms it hopes to introduce;
- Introduction of a number of new procurement ‘notices’, covering the entire procurement lifecycle from planning through to contract expiry. New notices have already started to be built into the Find a Tender service and the central public procurement platform.
- Provision of a registration service for suppliers, where they can input information that will be used by all contracting authorities during procurement processes – a ‘Tell Us Once’ system
- Digital platform which will display all this information publicly, with API access to data published to the Open Contracting Data Standard. There are plans once this is achieved to complete a core notice development and over time to build a number of useful registers and explore integrating commercial data analysis tools.
“While we are convinced of the benefits of introducing these transparency reforms, we understand that some authorities may be worried about an increased burden on their time in order to publish this information. In order to minimise this burden, there are a number of principles that underpin the development of our policy and systems.”
- User-centred development – Notice forms that are simple and clear, explanatory text
- Plug directly into systems – The platform will integrate into eProcurement systems.
- Data in, insights out – The platform will provide insights from commercial data in return, which will allow them to fully understand their markets to make better informed commercial decisions.
- Proportional levels of transparency – Only the most detailed information – contract documents, performance markings
New & Current Procurement Notices
Below is a list of new notices that are outlined in the Procurement Bill and further details of their scope will be set out in secondary legislation
- Planned procurement notices
- Preliminary market engagement notices
- Tender notices and associated tender documents
- Dynamic market notices
- Transparency notices
- Contract award notices and assessment summaries
- Contract details notices and publication of contracts
- Procurement termination notices
- Payments compliance notices
- Contract change notices and publication of modifications
- Contract termination notices
- Pipeline notices
What about suppliers?
Suppliers will input their information about their business and answer questions that are usually frequently asked during procurements. Contracting Authorities will be obliged to use these answers within their procurements. This “tell-us-once” system will reduce duplicating work for suppliers ensuring bidding into the public sector is easier whilst creating a standard and updatable business record to feed information to a centralised digital platform.
The system should be able to ensure that suppliers can also easily update information, such as relevant quality certification, insurance documents or other information which needs to be updated on a regular basis.
The benefits to suppliers will hopefully finally see areas such as insurance levels become more standardised, as Government can enforce more directly previous policy guidance, so that those Contracting Authorities who are out of step with for example insurance demands will be forced to standardise their approach.
Benefits of the Reform
The transparency reforms are long overdue, many countries already have single Governmental-wide platforms, and greater transparency and in fact previously within the UK, SID4Gov and SID4Health previously had much of this capability but was not consistently implemented.
The current implementation around procurement transparency has been implemented in a piecemeal, uncoordinated manner with no strategic use of systems, data or reporting. Each sector has different levels of transparency over areas such as spend, different levels of redaction of information, different data standards and inconsistent timeliness of publication. Above all there has been no policing and no action taken on Contracting Authorities who are non-compliant with current policies, including the very basics such as publishing Contract Award Notices.
The impact of these reforms will be beneficial to both procurement teams and suppliers. Reducing costs throughout the end to end procurement process and make bidding into the public sector open to businesses of all sizes by increasing visibility of tender opportunities as well as reducing administration burdens through the “tell us once” system. However, this will all depend upon the design, execution and implementation of new systems and policies.
Cabinet Office has said that it’ll provide at least six months’ notice before a new regime comes into force. Contracting Authorities should not underestimate the size of the task in ensuring compliance, including changes to its own internal operating guidance, policies and ensuring compliance.
