The UK coalition government is committed to putting more work out to government tenders. It’s already an enormous market, with £7.6bn being spent by central government alone, which means public tenders in the UK offer a precious opportunity to grow your business. More UK government bids than ever: Adding to that outsourcing pressure is the … Read more
Proposal writers may have noticed that on the 1st January 2014 the EU published new public procurement financial thresholds. These will apply to all award procedures under the public contracts regulations 2006. With these recent changes, now is a good time to look at what the financial thresholds are and what they mean for proposal … Read more
New information has emerged from the Cabinet Office describing the £84bn ‘procurement pipeline’ planned for the next five years. Covering 18 business sectors, the pipeline lays out the government’s anticipated project needs over the next few years. Notices of this kind have been published since November 2011; the most recent announcement adds professional services, financial … Read more
Over the last year you may have seen mentions in this blog of the Cabinet Office’s “mystery shopper” initiative, an enterprise that offers businesses the chance to ‘shop’ bad public procurement practice. They’ve finally released their first progress report, and it makes for fascinating reading. They’ve investigated over 300 complaints. Of those grievances: 81% of … Read more
The origins of the Virgin Rail scandal last month rapidly became lost in the recrimination and blame, as the Department for Transport attempt to apportion culpability and pundits discuss the role and capabilities of the civil service. When self-styled “tie-wearing adventurer” Richard Branson launched his legal challenge to the West Coast franchise decision two months … Read more
The G4S debacle we discussed in the last post raised a big issue for bid writers: how to qualify your bid. Is that astonishing £300 million tender opportunity going to turn into a real disaster for your company? Less melodramatically, are your bid writers going to waste weeks of sleepless nights filling out PQQs trying … Read more
Last week Win that Bid published a blog quoting a director from G4S as he proclaimed the rise of police privatisation. I wasn’t entirely positive about the prospect… and even as it went live on the site G4S became embroiled in a massive contract scandal reported across the world, destroying their share price. There has … Read more
There have been some recent changes in the way that public bodies can take social considerations into account when procuring public contracts. The new Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 aims to clarify the issue a bit. The Act (applied to public service contracts) creates a statutory requirement for public authorities to have regard to … Read more
A new IT procurement framework worth £1bn pounds has been announced by the Government Procurement Service. Recently, the government has had some problems with IT public sector tenders, reflecting badly on both its IT procurement methods but also on the obsolete legacy systems being used across the public sector. It is hoped that this framework … Read more
The Carbon Disclosure Project, a non-profit devoted to encouraging more environmentally responsible practices in business has released a report on “supplier management”. In particular, it highlights the increasing willingness of companies to drop suppliers who don’t abide by their CSR policies or environmental promises. There are several reasons for this. The first is arguably the … Read more