• Data & Decision Making
• Productivity & Innovation
• Regulation

Written by Robin Knowles, Founder & CEO, Digital Leaders

With the public sector spending £400Bn per annum, and the need to deliver more for less across local, regional and national government, the need to better understand how money is being spent puts good data at the heart of improving the process. 

Reasons for this include the ability to:

• Monitor procurement markets and trends: Governments can describe spending and time trends, and compare performance across entities, regions, contract types, etc.
• Use data to assist procurement policy-making: Governments can assess efficiency gaps to identify areas for reform, monitor the impact of new policies, and understand potential trade-offs of different strategies; and
• have transparency and accountability: Good data means civil society can monitor the procurement system.

Another important outcome of good data is to understand where the opportunities for innovation lie through identifying where procurement-powered innovation has created new value, whether it’s through open innovation challenge calls or other means. 

Our partners at IPEC Research, a centre funded by the Innovation Procurement Empowerment Centre, commissioned a paper through experts from the University of Manchester to review procurement data and they have identified some key barriers affecting the transparency of public procurement information in the UK, including data quality issues such as lack of unique identifiers, duplicated records, inconsistent dates, and missing data fields.

The paper which you can download here, found there is a real need for improvements in data collection, quality, and availability in public procurement. 

The research found challenges in ensuring transparency in UK public procurement Data including:

• The lack of unique identifiers; 
• duplicated records;
• inconsistencies in contract dates; and
• incomplete data fields.

Of course, this poor data impedes our ability to monitor procurement processes effectively. These challenges hinder transparency, accountability, and data-driven decision-making in public procurement. 

The research identifies the key issues as being:

• Data Quality: The absence of a centralised portal for procurement information leads to

duplication and inconsistencies. Different platforms are used to publish tender notices, but they are not integrated, and there are no unique identifiers across platforms; 

• Missing Data: Key procurement information such as contract dates and values is often

incomplete, and there is no systematic tracking of suppliers during the bidding process; and 

• Inconsistent Workflow Tracking: It is difficult to trace the full life cycle of procurement from pre-information notices to contract payments due to unlinked data across stages.

The upcoming Procurement Regulation Act aims to address some of these issues by

centralising data platforms and introducing supplier registration systems, which will improve data consistency and traceability. 

So it looks like improved data management is critical for enhancing competition, transparency, and public accountability in procurement processes. You can download the full report by pressing the button.

Wownload report here

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