Common sense may be coming back to procurement

Author: Lewis Ormston

Governments rarely make regulation simpler. But when they do, we should acknowledge the progress, regardless of who made the decision.

The decision to strip back procurement rules and put skills and jobs at the core is one of these moments. For years, anyone bidding for government work has had to tick an ever-growing list of boxes, demonstrating how they fund vast social programmes on the environment or local communities.

While the intentions were there at the time, piecemeal reform has left us with a system that favours the same big players who keep winning, with the small firms - ones with a laser-focus on creating jobs, driving innovation, and bringing new thinking - getting crowded out. And by the end of it, you sometimes don’t get the best supplier, you get the one with the biggest bid-writing team.

The new rules are a step in the right direction. One clear priority - jobs and skills - instead of a lengthy list that takes a full team to decode. The simpler rules apply only to contracts above £1m, so smaller firms aren’t drowning in red tape designed for the big players. And bidders are recognised for the jobs they create and the skills they build, not for how well they write a form. None of this is radical, and it’s how the government should be spending taxpayers’ money in a common-sense way, if it wants to create jobs, build skills, and grow the economy.

While refocusing the rules on British jobs and skills is welcome, it’s only half of what’s needed. Procurement matters in every sector. But nowhere are the consequences greater than in technology.

Government is one of the biggest tech buyers in the country, and every contract awarded is an opportunity to back a British startup, or entrench an overseas incumbent. Common sense says back the home-grown firm - yet too often, the same safe hyperscalers are chosen over the British tech scale-ups that could do the job better, cheaper, and with new ideas, locking departments into proprietary platforms where switching supplier becomes prohibitively expensive, even when better alternatives emerge.

This is where reform has to be more ambitious. ConservaTech’s inaugural paper, ‘Strategic Openness: A Conservative Doctrine for Digital Sovereignty’, made the case for creating genuine opportunities for British technology scale-ups through procurement reform. While these reforms do make it easier for the smaller players to compete, we need to reduce vendor lock-in, encourage interoperability, and create clear pathways for British scale-ups to win public contracts. None of this is complicated - it’s common sense. Government should think like a private business, and buy like one too. And we need to stop treating a healthy appetite for risk as something to avoid.

But none of this works without clarity. British startups need to know what these changes actually mean for them in practice - and they need that clear route to compete. Rules should be made smaller and simpler, not just a different set of hoops to jump through.

This is the right direction, and good ideas deserve backing, wherever they come from. But Whitehall needs to be more ambitious still - to get the best results, and to stop making the British tech firms we want to grow pay the price. That's not ideological - it's just good business.