Public Procurement
I have long argued that the procurement legal framework does not exist to enable great procurement, but to reduce the probability of really bad procurement being carried out. The cavalier approach taken by the UK Government in its COVID-19 related procurement shows the importance and value of the '
Public Procurement
I haven't had much time to look into #ventilatorgate in the past couple of weeks, but there was an interesting development last Friday with an update from the Cabinet Office. On this update we found out that: 1. The UK received 150 ventilators from Sweden in the first
Public Procurement
My good friends Marta Andhov and Willem Janssen launched a new public procurement podcast called Bestek to discuss contemporary procurement issues. The first episode is on COVID-19 responses and you can subscribe to it on any podcast platform (Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Soundcloud). Now if only I had
Public Procurement
As mentioned earlier in the blog, Portugal decided to change some of the rules regulating the use of the negotiated procedure without prior publication. At the time I warned the changes made a weak system even weaker and prone to abuse. Yesterday I got wind on Twitter of a contract
Public Procurement
It is now early May and over the last few days a small number of news pieces about the process. NBC has one about how some of the Chinese ventilators could kill patients if deployed in hospitals. More interestingly, both the FT and The Guardian have broader pieces of the
Public Procurement
The PPRG has recently published a new edition of its extensive public procurement bibliography, the first from 2011 and with 4,000 new entries. The PDF is available here. Having modestly contributed to the first edition when I was a Ph.D student at Nottingham a decade ago, it is
Public Procurement
EU and Mexico have concluded negotiations for a new trade agreement after finally agreeing upon the exact scope and reciprocal opening of public procurement markets. This new trade agreement will replace the existing one from 1997. And, for once, the last technical issue to be solved was public procurement.
Public Procurement
Yesterday I mentioned trust as the key currency of the COVID-19 crisis. That was done in the context of procurement but it is valid in other Government activities and none more so than the contact tracing apps we will have to rely on as we exit the lockdowns. Even
Public Procurement
On Friday I wondered about the status of the Dyson contract, but perhaps I should have waited until today to do so as the contract has now been cancelled. Dyson claims it spent £20M developing the new ventilator but it won't try to recoup the money from the
Public Procurement
Long-time readers of the blog will know of my views on transparency, particularly ex post transparency for contracts that have been awarded. There is an ongoing debate between the pros and cons of transparency, particularly its impact on competition. I am the opinion that publishing contracts in full should
Public Procurement
It is now a full month after the announcement that Dyson had been handed out a contract for the development of a new ventilator from scratch. In the absence of any recent official update, Dyson itself put out a nice video on April 14th stating that some units had been
Public Procurement
While the UK comes to grips now with the lack of PPE, in Ireland the situation is somewhat different and the reason for that is this: “ ” Sometime in March, Ireland struck a huge deal with China for 13x the usual annual spend on PPE. I do not know the exact