Guidance

Opening up the UK's £284bn of public contracts

Published 3 April 2019

The session focused on the long-term vision of opening up the UK’s £284 billion of public contracts. It was chaired by Gavin Hayman, Executive Director of the Open Contracting Partnership. He began with a quick introduction to the work that he and his team do, with an end goal of stimulating a genuine change in service delivery as a result of publishing government contracts.

The first speaker, Ian Makgil, Founder of Open Opps and Spend Network, started by stating that every public tender and contract should be free and openly available regardless of where you are. He is a part of Theybuyforyou.eu, a technology platform, an online toolkit and a public portal which allows suppliers, buyers, data journalists, data analysts, control authorities and regular citizens to explore and understand how public procurement decisions affect economic development, efficiencies, competitiveness and supply chains.

They work on collecting data from 700 different sources and over 120 countries. Moreover, their collaboration with the Alan Turing institute aims to provide better understanding on whether this data could be used for machine learning, for instance to show if a contact will be unfulfilled. However, the biggest challenge that emerges in the process is that the quality of the data is not good enough, thus making it insufficient to use. In the UK, the argument for greater transparency is popular, but the data isn’t used correctly. If we want to move forward, we need to get the data right and use it more proactively. Ian concluded his presentation with an analogy that the use of open contract data in the UK is like ‘having a Ferrari and keeping it in a garage’ - we have the right infrastructure and legal environment, yet it is not sufficiently used.

The next speaker, Rachel Rank, CEO of 360Giving, spoke in detail about the infrastructure essential to open up and use information, such as data standards and organisation identifiers. She argued that data standards improve efficiency and accountability - knowing what the government is giving in grants and contracts to whom and transparency in who is receiving it could help manage risks of paying or granting the same organisation several times. Such transparency in organisation identifiers enables more efficient procurement and better risk management, particularly in relation to government-issued identifiers. However, due to the data currently being of insufficient quality, the government is unable to immediately identify those risks.

According to Rachel, this could be mitigated through introducing the National Data Strategy and including standards and better data quality in the OGP National Action Plan. Another example of inaccurate government data infrastructure is separation of the Charity Commission and Companies numbers. Although the government provides both of the numbers, they are not available in an easily accessible format and introducing organisation identifiers could be used to track this. Finally, Rachel concluded that the problem of data quality should be addressed in order to keep our government and country government open for business and internationally competitive.

Tom Hall from the Government Digital Service (GDS) provided an overview of the Digital Marketplace, a cross-government platform for the government procurement of digital services and suppliers. So far in the UK, 48% of the total spend on the Digital Marketplace has been on SMEs, thus demonstrating that Digital Marketplace is more accessible for SMEs than other procurement platforms. Using multiple suppliers for smaller parts of the work also facilitates working with SMEs and helps avoid the risk of monopolies associated with the big suppliers. However, one of the challenges that the marketplace is currently facing is maintaining a high % of SME involvement in government procurement considering that there are projects that SMEs don’t have the capacity to compete for. The Digital Marketplace serves as a model for other countries, with an objective to help governments buy better and tackle corruption. GDS work with Mexico, Indonesia, South Africa, Columbia to pilot the model.

Jameela Raymond from the B Team spoke about how to encourage businesses to enhance their corporate accountability through opening up their contracts. She pointed out that trust, efficiency, and access are the key points to increase innovation and competitiveness of SMSs. The B Team advocate for enhancing procurement practices by opening up contracts on an international scale too and work to build the business case for open contracting and to engage the private sector.

Rachel Cooper, Director of the TI Health Initiative, began with a statement that there is a lack of evidence and insufficient research of the commercial benefits of open contracts in the health sector. TI Health initiative is about reducing corruption across pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors and open contracts data is key to achieve that. Currently, 20-40% of money spent in the health sector is consumed in ways that do little to benefit people. 6% of the total spend on global health is lost to corruption - mostly through procurement.

The complexity of the sector and dominance of a few big players makes it challenging for SMEs to break through and change the sectoral status quo. When healthcare fails to deliver, the use of resources is inefficient and leads to poor health outcomes and access. £1.2bn of NHS spend is lost to corruption, yet there are no systematic checks around recording the conflict of interest in the NHS, and at least 50% of NHS contracts are not transparent. TI Health believe that improving transparency and efficiency of the health sector would provide the funds necessary to fix the current funding problems.

During an interactive discussion with the audience, the panelists collectively came up with a set of actions for greater openness and transparency in public contracts:

• Improve quality and accessibility of the data

• Apply the same transparency standards to larger public contracts, e.g. defence procurement contracts

• Use the data already available in the UK to become international leaders in the field

• Find new methods to measure corruption within and between countries

• Continue advocating for open contracts while making a case of why we should all care about it

• Provide greater documentation of what happens in and after the procurement process

• Implement the OGP National Action Plan

This is an open discussion led by DCMS and our civil society partners, not an official statement of policy.