Shorter PQQ Writing

In our other article on our blog page, we discussed the fact that Sir Francis Maude was introducing plans to scrap the more onerous sections inside a PQQ, with the idea that this would further encourage SMEs to bid towards government contracts. Currently PQQs can be filled with questions that are not necessarily required for individual contracts, and the whole philosophy behind the PQQ stage being a filtering stage, a stage to whittle out the less able companies, has become standardised to a point where it can make it very difficult, if not impossible, for an SME to approach completing a PQQ unless it has a host of potentially unrequired policies in place.
Sir Francis Maude met with the EU Single Market Commissioner, Michael Barnier, last week, and afterward stated that the UK was already under way with streamlining purchasing policy and removing duplications and overlaps in an effort to reduce costs extensively. The bulk of this is down to the Government becoming less inefficient and cutting bureaucratic red tape when it comes to agreeing and managing procurement contracts. Savings in the last year reached £800 million, but this is a small drop in the ocean of procurement spending, which totals around £191 billion a year.

Following these talks it has been announced that the European Commission could help by revising EU public procurement rules and tit has been announced that there will be a proposal on the subject next month.
According to Mr Maude, previous Governments were not acting in the best interests of the UK economy when dealing with procurement practices. It has come to light that the UK awarded 3% of its public contracts to foreign suppliers. This may not seem like much but when compared to the 1.9% of Germany and 1.5% of France and considering the UK spends a huge £191 billion on procurement a year, it can be deduced that we are giving away £2.87 billion unnecessarily to foreign markets. This could be better used to promote growth across our whole economy, something that is especially important considering the current climate and economic downturn.

He went on to say, “The difference is the governments of these countries work closely with their domestic firms so they are geared up to win contracts at home and abroad. Whereas in Britain, by over-interpreting EU law and over-reacting to fears of bias in favour of British suppliers, we take an almost deliberately short-sighted approach to working with business.” This exhibition of foreign favouritism will not continue to happen in the future, according to Maude.
The potential changes to EU procurement law to be proposed next month will hopefully leave little room for over-interpretation of this kind and will also seek to reduce the barriers to entry encountered by SMEs when they attempt to bid for public contracts. Although there has already been progress in this area with 40% of contracts awarded to SMEs in September, compared with just 5% in January, there is still plenty of scope for improvement. Currently the costs that come with the tendering process in the UK are up to 4 times higher than those in France, for example, so the changes to the rules should strengthen the UK’s efforts to streamline the procurement process, which includes bringing the length of the majority of procurement contract award processes to fewer than 120 working days, a reduction of up to 40% in some cases.