Continuing with the theme of promoting engagement by SMEs in public procurement, Computer World UK highlights an intriguing statistic which may give the lie to the Government claims that its strategies are working.
Comparing stats for direct and indirect spend on SMEs it seems apparent that the increasing engagement of SMEs is, in fact, at one remove and is largely focussed within the supply chains of major government contractors.
This is good, we suppose, from the perspective that at least some of the spend on the big players is in fairly short order finding its way back into local economies. What is not so good is that the mega-structures which have resulted in numerous high profile procurement failures in recent times are largely unaffected.
The “trickle” of attenuated amounts of public money back into local economies via supply chains does not sufficiently address the range of goals which are identified as being met by increased SME engagement – the stranglehold of nationals and multi-national suppliers on public procurement spend needs to be comprehensively broken.
