Connected Places Catapult launches report ‘The Art of the Possible in Public Procurement’

Last Wednesday Connected Places Catapult hosted a bustling event in the House of Lords. The event, hosted by Lord Erroll, worked to launch the new report: ‘The Art of the Possible in Public Procurement’, developed by the Innovation Procurement Empowerment Centre (IPEC).

IPEC is run by Catapult in combination with the University of Birmingham and University of Manchester.

The speakers focused on both the importance of public procurement and the challenges it faces. Moreover, there was a focus on mobilising and exploiting the Procurement Act, which one speaker argued represented a lot of flexibility. Additionally, the contributors also noted the success of the Welsh Authorities in exploiting public procurement.

Altogether the night may have been best summed up when a contributor noted that although ‘procurement isn’t the sexiest’, it is vital to ensure that countries’ institutions run correctly.

Beyond the event last Wednesday, The Art of the Possible in Public Procurement report neatly summarised the five possibilities of procurement into; unlocking transformative power, exploiting rules as enables; exploiting the competitive flexible procedure; innovation everywhere and building a sharing community.

Here is a breakdown of these several key conclusions:

Firstly, although driving innovation through procurement was a key policy in the 2023 Procurement Act, this will not be achieved unless there is a drive to implement and deliver the potential of reforms.

Innovation ambitions often collide with constrained public finance and resourcing.

Procurement is too often seen as an administrative and legally-driven process where it should be instead used as a strategic lever. Procurement can be an empowering process and allow public sector leaders to achieve their targets on health and environmental challenges. It needs to be embraced in this manner.

Procurement needs to be integrated into innovation and business development strategies. It also needs to be linked with strategic planning. Within this, the National Procurement Policy Statement needs to be taken seriously and strategy teams should review this as a starting point for their procurement journey,

Social value delivery needs to be more closely integrated into the desired outcomes of the procurement.

Throughout the report numerous case studies were utilised to illustrate the points in hand; this ranged from Leicestershire’s Children Services to Freightlab to the London Housing Consortium.

The report also detailed the need for a mindset shift over procurement. Specifically, all procurements have the potential to generate a new idea and economic activity; we need to look beyond them as purely transactional.

Finally, the report had a strong localism focus. It was about illustrating local organisations just as much as national organisations can fulfil the potentials of procurement to instigate local change. This is especially relevant given the levelling up agenda of the last half a decade.

Moving forward into 2024 and a General Election year, events and reports like this will be vital to ensure that effective public procurement is a top priority for the next Government.

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