I don’t agree with Cameron but Yossarian had it right

As a matter of principle I don’t agree with anything David Cameron says. To establish my impartiality I should say I didn’t agree with anything Tony Blair used to say either. And I certainly don’t agree with Nick.

But from time to time I have to admit that even prime ministers can get it right. When David Cameron points the finger at over-bureaucratic procurement in national and local government he’s on the button.

His concern is about small businesses being excluded from tendering. Since I run a small business and work with many social enterprises I know what he means. But I reckon there is a much more important issue – the poor value that current procurement processes produce for the public sector.

Two goals are (usually) achieved – stopping corruption and meeting EU rules about open tendering. Of course I agree that corruption is a bad thing, and I do see the point of EU legislation. I just think it should be possible to put value (not price) a bit higher up the list.

But the problem with value is that it always involves some judgement. In turn the problem with judgement is that it requires expertise. So when the procurement process is to buy in expertise the purchaser has a big problem.

They don’t have the expertise to work out what they need or who can best provide it until they’ve bought in the expertise, by which time it’s too late. I suspect this isn’t technically a Catch-22 because there is a way out – there just shouldn’t be. The escape is that procurement experts and the client department use their ignorance to develop a detailed specification of something they don’t understand. When potential bidders ask for clarifications they can’t of course discover anything useful.

So a ‘robust and structured’ procurement process selects a bid on the basis of limited understanding of what they want, let alone how to work out who can do it best. And finally an expert contractor comes along and realises, too late, what should be done with the public funds available but is contracted to do something else entirely.
There is an option and it involves dialogue. An open discussion between purchaser and provider on what the needs are and how they can best be met. It’s what we are doing at present as we select a new IT service supplier. It’s what used to happen before procurement departments were invented.

Where a purchaser does have in house expertise and only needs to buy a product or service that they understand, procurement systems works well. The rest of the time they end up being a transparent and defensible approach to buying the wrong thing, at the wrong time, from the wrong people.

In a period of cuts and austerity, I’d like to line up with Yossarian…
‘You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions.’
(Major Sanderson diagnoses Yossarian as insane, Catch-22, Joseph Heller)