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5 Steps To Tackle Public Procurement Corruption.

Governments have rightly relaxed procurement rules in order to act quickly on Covid-19, but stories already abound on alleged corruption and financial mismanagement. For instance, there are the tests that don't work , the ventilators that never materialised, the PPE that failed to arrive, and the Health Minister who was sacked.  What's telling, is that these were ...
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Your supplier is on mute.

Does video conferencing make it easier to evaluate suppliers? We're just finishing up a bid. Our heads are full of equality policies, pricing and schedules. It's a strong bid, a great team and we've got all the necessary experience. It feels good. We've written a lot, it has taken a long time, but could it be different? It used ...
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Do Governments Want to Trade with Small Business?

Why Covid-19 should change Government's view of contracting with SMEs. -By Ian Makgill, Founder, Spend Network. In April the Government awarded a £108m contract to Crisp Websites Limited, trading as Pestfix (https://www.pestfix.co.uk) a small, family-owned firm in Littlehampton, West Sussex for the supply of PPE. At the time of the award, Pestfix had little or no trading history ...
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The Case For Using Data In Public Procurement

Our current model of procurement uses data for limited purposes. The primary analysis conducted by procurement teams is spend analysis, where buyers seek to identify opportunities for aggregating demand. Aggregation is where a buyer purchases more goods or services from a single supplier in order to achieve price reductions. In the public sector, spend analysis typically ...
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Tackling Covid-19 with open procurement data

To help public sector buyers around the world combat the Covid-19 emergency, we have built our supplier search tool (http://openopps.com/covid-19).  Our free service allows buyers to search for suppliers around the world that provide critical goods and services. By searching for a particular term, such as ‘PPE’ or ‘protective equipment’, users can be instantly connected to a ...

Public procurement data needs work.

Government data is much like infrastructure, valuable when it is cared for, troublesome when it is left unloved. Government spends nearly £400bn a year with suppliers, but most of this data is only available to the buyers and their suppliers. This is fine for managing individual contracts, but it is no good if you want to manage ...
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New OJEU Procurement Thresholds for 2020

The Government has recently updated the procurement thresholds for public sector procurement processes for 2020. We outline what this means for you and your business.   When does this take place? The updated thresholds for public procurement will affect new procurement processes from 1st January 2020 to 31st December 2020   Does Brexit affect this? Yes and no. From 31st January 2020, ...

A free hand or a free market? How competitive is public procurement in Europe? Part two of a three part series

This article is the second part of a three part series on competitive tendering in public procurement in Europe. There is a correlation between competitive tendering in public procurement and value for money as well as broader, positive procurement outcomes (e.g. contract completion on time, in full). As before, data was extracted from Tenders Electronic Daily ...

A free hand or a free market? How competitive is public procurement in Europe? Part one of a three part series

In this series of articles, we will explore how competitive the overall public procurement tendering process is for European countries. The most value for money in public procurement is linked to a competitive tendering process. This means encouraging multiple bidders to present offers. There are many ways to do this, all of which have a demonstrable ...

Counting the human cost of supported accommodation

BBC Newsnight worked with Spend Network to report on supported accommodation for looked after children. This forms part of their series Britain's Hidden Children's Homes. At present, over 5,000 looked-after-children are living in "supported accommodation". Supported accommodation are homes that provide support but not care to children under 18. These homes are outside Ofsted’s mandate for registration ...

Region profile: Insurance in Europe

In this article, we explore public sector insurance tenders in Europe. First, we look at how many tenders are being issued year by year by public sector bodies in Europe and their value. We then deep dive into some of the largest countries and show what the range of values and tender quantities these markets have. We ...

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