The Blue Print

When the recession first bit in the autumn of 2008, one of the commitments that came out of the first all-Wales economic summit – convened to tackle the recession in a co-ordinate way – was for the Assembly Government and other public sector bodies to work more closely with businesses who had public sector procurement contracts, to not only pay them on time but to increase the amount of business it did with indigenous companies.

Increasing the amount of Welsh businesses tendering and winning public sector contracts is very important to the private sector because £5bn worth of goods and services are procured annually by the public sector; so this wasn’t an inconsequential commitment. It actually wasn’t a new commitment either as a key pledge in the One Wales document published a year earlier stated:

“We will introduce an all-Wales purchasing code of practice to support progressive increase in the amount of public purchasing sourced from Wales.”

So how has the Government fared in delivering this pledge?

In its annual report, which was debated in Plenary last November, the Government stated that it was ‘COA’ or to jargon bust ‘Completed and Ongoing Activity’. For me, this way of measuring a key performance indicator on government progress seemed very odd – how can you have something that has been completed but is ongoing at the same time? There were other such examples, like one of the commitments in the Economic Development section of One Wales which stated:

“Implement a labour market strategy with a long term goal of full employment at the rate of 80%”

Again this commitment was labelled as COA, which as we all know, is a complete nonsense.

Andrew Davies, the Finance Minister at the time said that the levels of Welsh businesses securing public sector procurement contracts was rising and that nearly half of that business was being won by Welsh-based companies. However, the reality as I found is very different.

I have gathered information under a Freedom of Information Act request regarding the levels of ICT (Information and Communications Technologies) procurement local authorities and health boards had awarded Welsh businesses in 2008-09. I was amazed by the results. For those health boards that responded, nearly £40m worth of procurement contracts had gone to less than 5% of Welsh businesses; and from the local authorities that responded, nearly £45m of contracts had gone to less than 5% of indigenous companies.

I challenged the Government again today on its record and both the First Minister and the Business Minister admitted there had been problems for Welsh business to properly engage with the public sector and win those ICT contracts. The Business Minister said that she has been exploring recently with the Director of CBI Wales, David Rosser, what the barriers to procurement were and how access could be improved.

She promised me a Government statement; I look forward to hearing what she has to say.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Senedd Shorts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.