Scotland’s Procurement Reform Bill welcomed

Contractors in Scotland have welcomed last Friday’s publication of the Procurement Reform Bill, designed to give SMEs easier access to public contracts and link the award of contracts to community and employment benefits. 

Two years in the making, the Bill will also give Scottish ministers the power to extend the legal grounds for excluding bidders – a measure that could be used to bar contractors that have been involved in historic blacklisting.

Scottish Building Federation managing director Vaughan Hart said: “This legislation has been a long time coming. We have recently highlighted the spiralling cost to Scottish construction firms of participating in public tenders – now running to almost £100m a year. With a growing pipeline of publicly funded infrastructure projects planned over the years ahead, this Bill offers the potential to transform the efficiency of public procurement – and to encourage many more particularly smaller building companies to bid for public sector contracts. We will look forward to scrutinising the detail in the months ahead.”

The policy intention behind the Bill is for contracting authorities “to act without discrimination and in a transparent manner and in a way that is best designed to improve the economic, social and environmental well-being of the area in which the body operates”.

Under a new “sustainable procurement duty”, contracting authorities will have a general duty to:

• Improve the economic, social and environmental well-being of the authority’s area;
• Facilitate access to contracts by SMEs and Third Sector bodies, including supported businesses;
• Encourage suppliers to propose novel or innovative goods, works and services.

The Bill will require all contracts of more than £4m to consider including community benefits requirements in the contract or state in the contract notice the reasons for not including any requirement.

Purchasers would also be able to consider issues around workforce matters, such as remuneration and zero hours contracting, where these could affect the quality of service a company can provide.

A spokesman for the Scottish Building Federation said that the “community benefit” approach would also help give Scottish construction SMEs a “fairer crack of the whip” in the award of contracts. “If they have employed local people or created apprenticeships, that will be acknowledged in the process,” he said.

Alastair Merrill FCIPS, director of procurement and commercial for the Scottish Government, said: “The Procurement Reform (Scotland) Bill aims to establish a national legislative framework to support that model, encouraging an approach that is both business friendly and socially responsible. Its measures are intended to maximise procurement’s contribution to Scotland’s economic growth, delivering social and environmental benefits, supporting innovation, and promoting public procurement processes and systems which are transparent, streamlined, standardised, proportionate, fair and business friendly.”