How do you radically improve government public sector procurement?
By Ed Green, Deputy Director, EU and domestic procurement policy, Crown Commercial Service
We are on a journey to make the Crown Commercial Service a world class commercial organisation. By radically improving commercial practice and capability across government, we are enabling public sector organisations to secure great savings.
We are developing a fully managed service for departments and supporting more customers on complex transactions and contract negotiations, while continuing to put in place deals to provide all public sector organisations with access to common goods and services.
By increasing our focus on what happens at either end of the procurement process, we are improving engagement with suppliers before procurements commence, helping us leverage the latest innovations that can be delivered by a wide range of suppliers to meet our customers’ needs; and through contract management we are ensuring deals continue to deliver best value throughout their life. Our network of Crown Representatives is also managing relationships with our strategic suppliers on a ‘once for Government’ basis.
We are on track to meet Government’s aspiration for 25% of central government procurement spend to be with SMEs directly and in the supply chain by 2015. SMEs make up 62% of the suppliers currently available through our agreements, and we are working on making it easier for smaller businesses to tender for government business.
Overhauling the existing, outdated procurement rules has been a priority for the Government.
We negotiated hard in Brussels on a package of new procurement directives, which support UK Government priorities of economic growth and deficit reduction by making the public procurement process faster, less costly, and more effective for both customers and suppliers.
The new rules are deregulatory as they free up markets from bureaucratic processes – outdated and superfluous constraints have been removed, and many new features have been added to streamline and modernise public procurement. We aim to implement the new public contracts directive in early 2015.
We have cut procurement timescales by almost half; and the Lord Young reforms, set to be implemented early next year, will improve payment performance across the supply chain by ensuring all suppliers are paid within 30 days.
They will also remove pre-qualification questionnaires for low value contracts and introduce a standardised questionnaire for high value agreements. Through a new and improved Contracts Finder tool, the reforms will ensure that customers and suppliers have easy access to all public sector opportunities online and in one place.
Transparency is important, and these reforms will increase the number of public bodies reporting how much of their spend goes through SMEs and voluntary, community and social enterprises. We have also established a forum co-chaired by the Cabinet Office and the CBI to increase transparency in government contracting, and will publish a set of transparency principles later in the year.
Bill Crothers, Chief Commercial Officer for Government, continues to lead the wider programme of commercial reform. His priority areas include strengthening commercial capability throughout the Civil Service, improving the management of complex contracts and ensuring the Government acts as a responsible, intelligent and experienced client.
All this work has made great inroads on where we were in 2010, when there was no clear picture on how much was being spent with top suppliers, or a structure in place to manage those suppliers on a cross-government basis. However, we know there is still some way to go – over the next few months there is a great opportunity for us to expand and embed these planned reforms across government.
Ed Green is Deputy Director, EU and domestic procurement policy, Crown Commercial Service.
