interviews

The impact of last year’s procurement regulation changes

Helen Lisle, chair of the Health Care Supply Association (HCSA) and a director of procurement in the NHS, looks back over the last year and gives her thoughts on the impact changes introduced by the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 (PCR15) have had on procurement professionals and their wider organisations.

I think it would be fair to say that when the new Public Contracts Regulations were initially announced, the most frequently discussed area of change was the abolition of Part B services. While interested, I was slightly saddened by this and wondered whether we were actually doing our colleagues procuring in this arena a disservice, as many already carried out extremely robust procurement processes. Such processes may not have been characterised as open or restricted, but nonetheless they followed clearly documented and rigorous processes.  

There was also much hype about ‘new’ procedures and the ‘improved’ procedures, such as the competitive procedure with negotiation, innovation partnership, and dynamic purchasing systems. 

Alongside the hyped changes there were so many other changes, including, but certainly not limited to, the removal of the PQQ (pre-qualification questionnaire) for under-threshold procurements, the need to consider splitting contracts in smaller lots to support SMEs, and the need to formally document procurement decisions made when establishing a contract, framework agreement and a dynamic purchasing system. 

Electronically available 

But, the reality is that the biggest impact for procurement professionals and their organisations has been the need to make procurement documents available electronically from the date of the OJEU.  

This impact is of course two-fold; firstly (and possibly the easier, you would think, to deal with) is making documents freely available from the date of OJEU. But even this seems to have posed a problem for some organisations already advanced in the use of eTendering. 

Secondly, having a full document set ready at the commencement of a procurement process has been a huge shift in practice. Essentially, prior to the changes, when organisations followed a restricted procedure, the individual documents, such as the PQQ (including selection criteria and outline specification) and invitation to tender (ITT, including final specification and award criteria etc) would be worked up throughout the procurement stages. So the move to ‘documents up front’ has been a significant change in mindset and practice for most. It frontloads the process and requires robust planning capabilities organisation-wide.  

Yes, there has been some interest in the new and tweaked procedures, and the shorter timescales, some of which may prove to be useful going forward. But the reality remains that on the ground focus has had to be around the education of the wider audience of the increased significance of partnership working and planning!

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