UK open contracting: good policy & maturing platform – it’s time to invest in implementation

[Summary: relecting on national open contracting progress in the UK]

Last week the Prime Minister issued a letter reminding central government departments of their transparency responsibilities and providing updated guidance on the information that should be disclosed and how. Amongst the guidance, is a revised note on “Publication of Central Government Tenders and Contracts” which provides a good snapshot of the current position for national government contracting (and which is also framed as useful guidance for Local Authorities considering their responsibilities under the local government transparency code).

The note covers:

  • The legislative requirement to publish most opportunities and awards over £10,000 via the Contracts Finder platform;
  • The policy committment of central government to see all tender documents, and contract texts attached to those notices on Contracts Finder;
  • Guidance on all the documents that go to make up the contract (and so that should be attached to Contracts Finder)
  • Re-iteration of the limitations to redaction of contract documents;
  • Recommendations on transparency clauses to include in new contracts, to have clear agreement with suppliers over information that will be public.

As contracting transparency policy goes: this is good stuff. We’re not yet at the stage in the UK of having the kind of integrated public financial management systems that give us transparency from planning to final payment, nor are their the kind of lock-in measures such as checking a contract has been published before any invoices against it are paid. But it does provide a clear foundation to build on.

The platform that backs up this policy, Contracts Finder, has also seen some good progress recently. With hundreds of tender and award notices posted every week, it continues to provide good structured data in the Open Contracting Data Standard through an open API. In the last few weeks, the data has also started to capture company registration numbers for suppliers – a really important key to linking up contracting and company ownership information, and to better understanding patterns of public sector contracting. The steady progress of Contracts Finder as a national platform (with a number of features also now added to help capture sub-contracting processes too) makes it absolutely key to monitoring and improving implementation of the policies described above.

There are still some challenges for the platform: data quality (and document availability) for many of the records in Contracts Finder relies upon the features of e-Procurement systems used by departments or local authorities to manage their contracting processes. If these systems don’t encourage inclusion of company identifiers, or contracting documents, we may struggle to reach full policy compliance and the best data quality. Ongoing improvements to the APIs for data entry, and to the tools for monitoring data quality, could certainly help here, as would increased engagement with e-procurement system vendors to get them to bake open contracting into their platforms, as Chris Smith has called for.

However, as we head in 2018, whilst we have to keep working on policy and platforms – the real focus needs to be on implementation: monitoring and motivating each department or public agency to be sure they are not only seeing transparency in procurement as a tick-box compliance excercise, but instead making sure it is embraced as a core part of accountable and open government. To date, Open Contracting in the UK has been the work of a relatively small network of dedicated officials, activists and entrepreneurs. If the vibe at OC Global last month was anything to go by, 2018 may well be the year it moves into the mainstream.

Disclosure/notes

I’m a member of the UK Open Contracting Steering Group, working under Commitment 5 of the UK OGP plan and I work for Open Data Services Co-op as one of the Open Contracting Data Standard helpdesk team.

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