Procurement bill missed opportunity for people and communities

How do you solve a problem like procurement? Not in a short and snappy blog unfortunately. And not very easily, if you consider the years of discussion and the fundamentally flawed Procurement Bill currently winding its way through parliament What can you say about procurement? Well, it’s a £9bn spend we still can’t get right – £9bn that we still don’t direct to help build strong local economies, to create jobs in local businesses and to help reduce inequalities and poverty. I recently read a Scottish Government paper on the ‘contribution of procurement to sustainable economic growth’. Great, but where was its contribution to reducing health inequalities, for example? The way to improve procurement of course is to move towards using ’social impact’ as the main decider in how we spend our public money, rather than price alone. Governments must use factors such as ensuring local economic spend and enhancing well-being when deciding where to spend their money. This means putting social outcomes before immediate cost considerations. It will not surprise you that social impact is widely used across Europe. The fact is, even if you did only look at it from an economic model perspective, an investment in helping people return to work is also in reality an investment in public health because having a decent job is good for your health. By using procurement to promote job creation, governments can save money on health spending.

By using procurement to promote job creation, governments can save money on health spending.

This neatly brings us to one of the contentious areas of the Bill, or I should say one of the areas not in the Bill: the Living Wage. The bone of contention with the Scottish Government is although they support the principle, it says it can’t go into the Bill because it asked the European Commission and they said no. There is the view which, although this sounds a bit harsh, I happen to agree with: that if you ask a stupid question, you get a stupid answer. You could write a whole about whether or not the Scottish Government asked the right question and if they asked the right part of the Commission? Why didn’t they just say this is what we’re doing and how do we do it? In my view, we can and should introduce the Living Wage into the Procurement Bill. Let’s look at the so-called risk. It will be challenged maybe, but the reality is that for any supplier, especially those from the private sector, as long there is a level playing field that’s fine. The Scottish business organisations who oppose the Living Wage may moan about it but they won’t – as someone put it to me – ‘die in a ditch over it’. So, how do we solve a problem like procurement? A good starting point would be not having a Bill whose provisions are very short on specifics and its duties too ambiguous. We need to answer the question: what are we trying to achieve with procurement? For us, it’s all about how we use procurement spend to benefit people and communities across Scotland – creating jobs, sustaining local businesses and communities. Unfortunately, the current Bill is fast becoming a missed opportunity to do that. If you’re interested in finding out more, check out the BBC’s coverage of SCVO’s evidence to the Infrastructure and Capital Investment Committee on the Procurement Reform Bill