Transparency on the reporting of public procurement information

With the public sector spending £400Bn per annum, and the need to deliver more for less across local, regional and national government, the need to better understand how money is being spent is absolutely necessary for reasons such as:

•    Procurement markets and trends monitoring: Governments can describe spending and time trends, and compare performance across entities, regions, contract types, etc.

•    Data-driven procurement policy-making: Governments can assess efficiency gaps to identify areas for reform, monitor the impact of new policies, and understand potential trade-offs of different strategies.

•    Transparency and accountability: Civil society can monitor the procurement system.

Another important aspect is to understand where the opportunities for innovation lie through identifying where procurement-powered innovation has created new value, whether it’s through open innovation challenge calls or other means. Owing to the challenges around reporting, this has proven to be a challenge.

IPEC Research, a centre funded by the Innovation Procurement Empowerment Centre, commissioned a paper through experts from the University of Manchester to identify some key barriers affecting the transparency of public procurement information in the UK, including data quality issues such as lack of unique identifiers, duplicated records, inconsistent dates, and missing data fields.

The paper makes the argument that improvements in data collection, quality, and availability in public procurement is important to support accountability, transparency and to inform policy reform.

The authors found three main challenges:

• No central repository to publish a call (there are several) with inconsistent recording periods.
• Many fields are left blank by the buyers.
• The procurement data doesn’t provide an end-to-end flow from pre-information to contract award and expenditure.

The report suggests that it is important to improve the collection, compilation, quality, storage and availability of procurement information. The authors argue that the Act will address some of the problems mentioned in the report. For instance, there will be a platform for suppliers to register and store their details to avoid having different names for the same suppliers. Also, there are plans in the Act  to join into a single database the information to centralise procurement data.

Download the full publication below.