PQQ completion made easy

Since the start of the economic recession, the new Government has been quite vocal about its vision for a public sector that buys from SMEs. With traditionally low engagement and high barriers to entry, SMEs have tended to shy away from tendering for public sector contracts with the consensus being that it was a waste of time and money.
Much earlier in the year, we discussed the various ways that the government was attempting to engage with SME’s in the tendering arena. Most of these related to reduced bureaucracy – reduced entry costs, reduced preparation time and lower operational demands.

In order to monitor the success of their efforts in opening up the public sector to SMEs, the government developed a ‘mystery shopping’ exercise which has yielded some startling, and disappointing, findings. Documented in depth on the Cabinet Office website, the exercise covered a wide number of public bodies including local authorities, the Police, the NHS, DWP and, surprisingly, the Cabinet Office itself.

Some of the problem issues raised related to things which really don’t hold SME’s in particular back, such as technical issues on internal procurement sites and system errors that can affect all bidders. Many of the other issues raised appeared to have a significant impact on the ability of SMEs to tender for contracts.

Some of the most common and more alarming issues included:

- Overly complicated and demanding PQQ writing submissions for low budget contracts

- Grouping complex services, such as consultancy, in such a way as to make it near impossible for one SME to cover all bases

- Unrealistic turnover and other financial demands on bidders at PQQ submission stage

- Suspicions about specifications being written based on one preferred large supplier, ensuring that other companies were unable to meet the exact specification

- Sudden withdrawal of complex tenders where considerable investment has been made in producing them

The main areas of complaint seemed to be based around unrealistic financial demands at the PQQ stage and overly complicated PQQ and tender processes. Tenders that automatically exclude vast numbers of SME’s through arbitrary criteria unrelated to the ability of the tender applicants to fulfil the contract well were also of concern.

Francis Maude, who is the minister driving the SME vision, said, "The first results from mystery shopper are helping us to uncover the barriers to SMEs.” This is a somewhat surprising stance considering that in the early stages of the inclusion drive, most of these aspects were identified. What really seems to be the issue is that, although the barriers have been identified, buyers are slow to modernise their approach to procurement processes and find it easier to impose barriers than be inundated with inordinate numbers of appropriate suppliers, regardless of size.