Public Procurement and Property

Our second Scottish Procurement vlog of 2023 with Nick Ford

July 18, 2023 by Fiona McCaig No Comments | Category Scottish Procurement

We recently caught up with our Director, Nick Ford, to hear his reflections on recent months, highlighting some key achievements and successes across the procurement community.

Looking ahead, Nick also shares some of the events and publications you can look forward to seeing in the near future. Watch the video below, a transcript for this video is also available at the bottom of the page.

If you would like to know more about some of the things Nick covered in this video, please visit the links below:

• First Public Procurement Strategy for Scotland published
• Scotland Innovates
• New guidance published for SMEs and Third Sector Suppliers
• GO Awards Scotland entries now open
• Meet the Buyer North 2023 – 12 September

For further information on public procurement in Scotland please visit www.gov.scot/procurement

Please email enquiries to scottishprocurement@gov.scot

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Single speaker transcript, Nick Ford:

Hi everyone,

and welcome to my summer vlog.

I am really pleased to share some of our achievements as well as looking ahead to what’s coming up.

On 27 April, we published the first ever Public Procurement Strategy for Scotland. A huge milestone for public sector procurement in Scotland.

This strategy provides a clear vision and focussed direction, supporting the whole Scottish public procurement community to align, to collaborate and to deliver positive outcomes with real impacts for the people of Scotland.

We also had the UK National GO Awards at the beginning of June, and I would really like to take this opportunity to congratulate all of the finalists and all of the winners.

It is great the see the impact of public procurement delivering and being recognised across the UK.

A special mention to the various Scottish organisations who picked up winners on the night. They were:

• The University of Strathclyde
• The City of Edinburgh Council
• South Ayrshire Council
• Scotland Excel

The calibre of entries was very impressive and I am really looking forward to seeing the submissions for this year’s Scottish GO Awards in October.

Over the past few months we’ve been working closely with our new Minister for Procurement, Mr Tom Arthur MSP, the Minister for Community, Wealth and Public Finance. We recently welcomed Mr Arthur to our first in person Heads of Procurement event. The first one in over three years, and it was great to get everyone together in the room, a real opportunity to showcase the power of procurement and demonstrate a strong links with the community wealth building.

On 27 June, we marked the world SME Day, by publishing new guidance ensuring that SMEs continue to have the advice and support they need, to bid for and to win public sector contracts.

There is already a really strong track record of SMEs winning public contracts, here in Scotland and this guidance will help to build on the significant progress we’ve already made.

I was delighted to see the National Innovation Strategy published in June. It demonstrates how we will deliver product, service and process innovation, which makes the most of our natural advantages and translates our research excellence into commercial opportunities across Scotland. Scotland Innovates is a key tool to support innovation through procurement.

We will shortly be sharing a new policy note on recent innovation related developments. So if you sign up to our blog, you’ll be notified when this is published.

We’re currently looking at how construction procurement can be improved and potentially reformed in Scotland. Earlier this year, we worked alongside the built environment Smarter Transformation and the Glasgow School of Art Innovation School to run a series of facilitated workshops. I was pleased to see really good engagement and representation from across industry and across the public sector. The recommendations from these have been reviewed by Cross-Industry steering group, so keep your eyes out for more updates in the next quarter.

We’ve also had a number of conferences and events NHS procurement for health, the Meet the Buyer National and the Scotland Excel. Brilliant events that I really enjoyed!

And then coming up, we have Supplier Development Programme, Meet the Buyer North and Meet the Buyer South in September and October. Ideal opportunities for businesses in these areas to engage with Scotland’s public sector. And then we’ll be hosting our own 18^th National Procurement Conference at the SEC in Glasgow on 31 October. Alongside the GO Awards Scotland.

So that’s it for now, always a pleasure giving these updates. I hope you managed to get a good break over the summer. An ideal time to reflect on their achievements to date and what we’ll be doing going ahead.

So see you again in the autumn!

Tags: Public procurement, public sector procurement, Scottish Procurement, Scottish public sector, SMEs, sustainable procurement

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