EC consults on procurement law overhaul

Odds on a fix

Government procurement is monumentally expensive, with often hundreds of pages of documentation required for even a relatively small contract making bidding for contracts expensive and time consuming, and not particularly transparent even to the people involved on both sides of the bid.

A lot of the bureaucracy is a waste of space and could be done once, relatively quickly for any bidder, a tick list of do you comply with this or that piece of legislation or directive.

But the bigger hurdle is the constant pressure to drive costs down, small contracts cost relatively more than large ones, and large government wide purchasing contracts will effectively lock out SMEs from government because they will not be able to offer the discounts or scope that multi-nationals can, and thus they become relegated to sub-contractors, which actually degrades their service. Be it building or IT, when a large framework, or outsourcing deal is struck, a lot of the services are provided by the third party providers, in fact often fourth or fifth party, who could obviously supply directly more cheaply, but just not at the scale government wants.

And it's not just government, big supermarkets, banks and other chains do the same, they negotiate a national deal, and push the local problems off to the outsourcer, they save on direct management costs, and senior management time, but probably not on costs.

The only way you can let smaller businesses into government contracting is by moving decision making on contracts back to lower, regional and local levels, and can you really see that happening.

Yes, by all means cut the paperwork, and lower the entry costs, but it won't do much good on its own.

I would guess the next step would be for an FM Outsourcer and an IT one to merge and then you could outsource everything to one player.

Perhaps if UK PLC had more management balls and capability and less focus on their bonus we might have a much better market.