As we prepare for our departure from the EU there are some businesses and many politicians that are pleased that the European procurement rules will drop away. Indeed a few days ago in Brighton & Hove news Councillor Steve Bell wrote a piece claiming the benefits of our departure from the point of view of SMEs (Small and Medium Size Enterprises). I commented on the piece arguing his view was at best a bit biased, but others then responded, pointing out that in the UK we are very good at ‘gold plating’ such rules, ensuring that they were complied with double and triple times. This means in my understanding that there may not be anything wrong with the EU, but rather we are not good as a nation in following rules in an efficient manner.

The fact is that public procurement is a challenge inside and outside of the EU. Our Government and public sector bodies pay lip service to supporting SMEs but what they focus on is the medium sized business, that employ up to 250 people, totally ignoring the small business that employ 10-50 people and the micro enterprises that employ 9 or less people. One of the areas of public procurement is in the educational sector. The colleges and Universities create framework agreements on which businesses are invited to apply to be listed, but because of the economy of scale of such processes, their geographical stretch is substantial. The So called South East and Southern Universities Procurement Consortium, includes 126 institutions from Kent to Devon and from the South Coast to Birmingham. It is a separate framework from the London Universities consortium. The frameworks are intended to be based on a short list of accepted companies, so only 10 are included. Because all of the work needs carrying out in the Summer, most of these 10 companies do not have sufficient in house workers to meet the obligations placed on them by the framework and so they rapidly expand their ‘work force’, taking on subcontractors, many of whom have little affinity for the work involved and the risk is that the communication between the main contractor and the University, and then the contractor to the sub contractor, means that the University is delivered a sub standard piece of work simply because of communication limitations. The irony is that many small or even micro businesses which possess the skills to meet such demands, albeit at a local level are unable to get a foothold on the frameworks and the few that do, are put in such a difficult position because they are obliged to meet around 10% of the overall demand. If only the Universities would take the time to consider a different approach, they could achieve a much better end result. The truth is these arrangements will not change as a result of us leaving the EU, however our departure does give us an opportunity to reinvent a very broken wheel. We need to find new ways of ensuring public sector procurement teams understand the whole of the process they instigate so that they can then pick out the best ways forward for our business community as well as for the agencies needing to select a suitable business.