back to article Coalition rejigs gov procurement to give SMEs an in

The government launched a new website this afternoon for contractors looking to win public sector jobs that cost over £10,000. It's hoped that more small businesses will get involved in the procurement process, said Prime Minister David Cameron. Stephen Allot has been tasked with improving dialogue between Whitehall and …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Is it me?

    Don't bet the farm

    On a government contract, they have a habit of going away. it's like any form of betting, don't make the bet unless you can afford to loose. Never expose your business to more liability than you can afford. Government can take you right up to contract signature and still cancel, and in fact even when there is a contract you can be left waiting for payment because a politician or department won't sign off a completed project until after the budget, an election, a reshuffle, a public enquiry.

    It has been known for SMEs to go to the wall waiting for sign-off, so yes fine we can all read OJEUs, we can win them, but there's still dragons out there. The Minister can't possibly sign this off in the current .... climate, just wait for a quiet moment and we'll sign-off.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Betting the farm

      Sometimes forcing the supplier to the wall is part of the plan.

      As a company who acts as tech lead for various small web design houses we end up getting called in to propose solutions and sometimes implement them.

      A "no brainer" web site for a part of the NHS ended up in taking the web design house out of business. This lot then sent our *propiertary* technology to a body shop in india who (when the one year licence ran out) called us to complain we had "hacked" thier software.

      After discussions (and legal threats), this lot then offered us what seemed like a nice deal to re-implement and support the original website. We forced them to include payment to the original designers and because they seemed to have no idea how to write a spec or contract used one of our large scale contracts and created one for them - in framemaker as a PDF.

      We got signed copies of what looked like our original contract in the post with a request to return one signed copy by "end of day". It became obvious it was not a Frame doc and the SOP is to read anything very carefully before signing so we ignored the ASAP/today and found the "nasties" they had hidden in the contract. One clause would have meant that we would have been required to do any task they requested in a timescale they defined for one UKP.

      Evidently this part of the NHS has never heard of a legally "unfair" contract.

      There was a long delay from sending out our mutually agreed contract to the signing and returning. It seems this delay was to allow thier legal team time to rewrite the contract in an almost identical style to our original frame doc - and it takes *effort* to get word to look like a professional frame doc.

      Eventually we stopped responding to thier emails and phone calls.

      1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
        Thumb Up

        AC@00:13

        Interesting story. I guess it taught the principles some painful lessons.

        it's a bit unclear was it the NHS *directly* that was playing dirty or the Indian outsourcer?

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    With RSS?

    Can't be bothered to visit most websites.

    How do they ask someone to develop the web site? Via another website? Or will this website cost ten squillion quid and be exempt from the criteria?

  3. Flossie
    Thumb Up

    PQQ's

    PQQ's are an absolute nightmare for a small business, they can sometimes involve days of work just to be allowed to bid for a small job. I dread to think how much it costs the government to pay people to wade through the responses. I'll be glad to see the back of them.

  4. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Thumb Up

    *might* just be the start of something.

    The classic civil servant CMA mentality of "Oh but this contract is bigger than 50% of your turnover. It's *too* scary to use you" could still scupper.

    Not that that stopped the NHS betting the hospital (in fact several hospitals) on a software company whose accounts were fraudulent.

    They were *special*.

    Cautious thumbs up.

  5. This post has been deleted by its author

This topic is closed for new posts.