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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 three of a three part series
This article is the last of a three part series on competitive tendering in public procurement in Europe. We have already learned that European tendering is positive in some aspects (amount of time given to respond) and less positive in others (provision of information to bidders). In this article, we’ll be looking at the number of ...
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 ...
‘Data that Cares’, a report into the Adult Health and Social Care market using our data
We are pleased to announce the release of the FCC/IPPR report ‘Data that Cares’! This is a report into the Adult Health and Social Care Market that breaks new ground in analysis of this sector. Our analysis and data revealed that 5-6% of the market is at ‘risk’. This means that circa 25,000 beds are at ...
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 ...
Country Profile: South Africa
South Africa is seeing an increased interest in public procurement owing to corruption and the role it plays in economic development. The question is: where can the most impact be made?
As we can see from this graph, over the last three years, contracting has been increasing steadily with a dip in 2019. Buying tends to increase ...
How closed is Malaysia? Country Profile: Malaysia
In the wake of the 1MBD scandal and the arrival of a new government, has any meaningful change occurred in Malaysia procurement?
The answer is complicated. Tenders have opened up in Malaysia to an extent, especially in there period FY18/19 when Spend Network found 654 tenders compared to almost nothing before. But this 654 tenders compares to ...
The French Connection: public sector demand in France
In this article we’ll be looking at France’s public sector demand over the past 5 years to see what the largest categories are. From our data, the top 21 types of tenders coming from France over the past 5 years were as follows:
Construction work, as with many other European countries, features prominently. Other recurring tender types ...
Building Europe, a Region Profile: Construction in Europe 2016 to mid 2019
For all its recent troubles, Europe is seeing growth in one sector: construction in the public sector. In this article, we explore the trends in the European public works sector.
An overview of Europe's public sector construction market
As we can see from the chart for the period from the beginning of 2016 to present the amount of ...