The need for a public procurement strategy

It is “disappointing” that there is no strategy for public procurement in Northern Ireland, the Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee has said.

In a November 2024 report, Public Procurement in Northern Ireland, designed to assess public procurement practices in Northern Ireland, the Committee states that it is “disappointed that the first key weakness is the absence of a specific strategy which should establish and clearly articulate the high-level objectives that public procurement is working towards the achievement of”.

The report indicates a specific strategy is an integral building block of the arrangements needed to coordinate a function such as procurement that is carried out across a range of different organisational, governance, and commercial market contexts.

In the absence of a formal strategy, the report acknowledges that the current structures used to deliver public procurement – the model of a network of specialised Centre of Procurement Expertise (CoPE) dispersed across the public sector – has, subject to some organisational changes, remained relatively stable in recent decades.

However, in the Committee’s view, these assurances are undermined by the “lack of sufficiently detailed and specific performance information that can provide overall assurance that this system is consistently working effectively and delivering effectively”.

The report also acknowledges that, between 2020 and 2022, a number of different initiatives had been undertaken that were all underpinned by a coherent vision of how public procurement could be modernised and work more effectively. These include:

• the reconstitution of the Procurement Board with a new membership structure;
• the introduction of five new procurement policies;
• clarification of the relationship between procurement policy and procurement guidance;
• the introduction of toolkits to provide best practice guidance to procurement staff;
• the inclusion of specific monitoring and reporting requirements in respect of each new procurement policy; and
• the establishment of a Commercial Delivery Group within the Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS).

Nevertheless, the report states that the committee remains “unconvinced” by evidence provided that the current structures used to deliver procurement in Northern Ireland are sufficient to meet the challenges faced and maximise the opportunities for efficient and effective procurement services.

Value for money

In Northern Ireland, most purchases made by public bodies (contracting authorities) are undertaken with the support of one of nine Centres of Procurement Expertise (CoPE). These centres work in partnership with contracting authorities providing technical expertise and ensuring procurement exercises are compliant with legislation and designed in a way that delivers maximal value.

However, owing to the number of centres and the small geographical size of Northern Ireland, the committee has question the effectiveness of this approach, arguing that a region the size of Northern Ireland would benefit from a centralised approach in order to ensure best value for money.

The Department of Finance has said that current arrangements represent an attempt to “effectively balance and manage the competing costs and benefits that can be offered by centralised and decentralised delivery models”.

In spite of the Department’s assertion, the Committee recommends that, within six months of the establishment of a procurement strategy, the Department of Finance establishes a set of metrics that will be used to provide the basis of cross-sectoral performance assessment for the effectiveness of procurement and ongoing evaluation of the impact and value of current CoPE structures.