Making sure procurement practice is best practice
The Mystery Shopper service is evolving to ensure concerns raised by suppliers about public sector procurements are properly resolved.
The Crown Commercial Service Mystery Shopper team is now actively following up to check how contracting authorities have implemented the recommendations.
This means the investigation doesn’t end when bodies say they will make changes - the Mystery Shopper team is following up to make sure that changes were made that support public procurement in being open to all businesses, including SMEs.
Suppliers already know they can contact the Crown Commercial Service’s Mystery Shopper team to raise issues about a procurement, and the team then works with the supplier and the authority to broker a result.
In many cases, recommendations are agreed with the bodies to make changes to future procurements, and details of these cases are then published.
Now, the results of the follow-up investigations will be published every month alongside the usual Mystery Shopper publication.
For more information about CCS’s Mystery Shopper service, visit the Mystery Shopper webpages