Public Procurement and Property

Hi everyone!

It’s great to be back!

My first vlog of 2025.

Where I’ll be taking a look back at some of the recent developments and a quick look forward at what’s coming up across the public procurement community.

First up, the Minister for Public Finance, Ivan McKee, recently brought together the leadership of public bodies, elected and operational leadership of Local Government.

The third sector and representatives of the wider economy at a Public Services Reform Summit, to look at how we collaborate and discuss and set out a path for transformational change on improving public services.

Now we play a major role in this to our programmes of work on our National Collaborative Procurement, Commercial Value for Money programmes and the Single Scottish Estate programme, making a real efficiency and securing savings for the public sector.

The Supplier Development Programme was also present at the event, providing information on the services they can offer.

I’m looking forward to seeing the outcomes of the discussion from the summit and the actions that will be taken forward as a result. And as always, procurement will have an important contribution to make.

We also introduced a new Scottish Procurement Policy Note covering changes to the Scottish procurement legislation, reflecting updates at various International Trade Agreements and to fulfil some of our international obligations.

We’ve made some minor system updates to Public Contract’s Scotland, so to make sure you’re able to familiarise yourself with what’s in there, links to all of the documentation and guidance I mention today will be included in the accompanying blog for this video.

In February, I also had the opportunity to meet with colleagues from the Procurement Supply Group.

A very productive meeting with a great conversation covering community health and social care procurement, as well as updates to the sustainable procurement on environments and on modern slavery standards.

We have also been focusing on updates to our SME and Third Sector Action Plan, looking at the structure and key themes for the next two years. Which are oversight and communications, policy in practice and systems and tools.

As we near the one-year mark since launching the action plan, it’s vital that we continue to evaluate our progress and establish ways to share insights and progress.

Now, looking ahead, we are getting close to publishing our own Scottish Government  Annual Procurement Report for 2023 to 24, as well as the annual Ministerial Report  of Procurement Activity in Scotland, which provides a fantastic overview  of public procurement activity across the whole of Scotland in 22 and 23.

The report is based on information contained in individual annual procurement reports prepared by public bodies and shows how they’ve used their spending power to generate a range of positive economic, social and environmental benefits. So please do look out for these coming soon.

Our new Biosecurity guidance is now live on our Sustainable Procurement  Tools website. It complements a series of existing guidance, that is already available, and is designed to help organisations embed sustainability into their procurements.

The website can be accessed by both registered and unregistered users, so please do make the most of this great tool set.

In December, we launched our Fair Work First eLearning to support organisations  across Scotland to embrace Fair Work First, a Scottish Government policy aimed at promoting high quality, fair work and workforce diversity.

This also sits on the Sustainable Procurement Tools website and forms part of a broader set of tools including Climate Literacy, Circular Economy and several practical case studies.

This month, we also held a workshop on refreshing the Public Procurement Group 25/26 as part of our commitment to ensuring the PPG operates effectively and delivers value.

We felt it was a really good opportunity to undertake a review. One of the main changes we discussed as a group was around widening representation. Some more communications about this will come out soon. As part of the PPG workshop, we also discussed the Public Procurement Strategy for Scotland and how to ensure we track and measure the outcomes.

This April will mark the strategies two year anniversary and we will be producing a report with a set of key performance indicators to use as a baseline going forward.

This will use data from the Ministerial Annual Report and the professionalisation data that we have asked Heads of Procurement to provide. So thank you for responding.

We have enhanced the Procurement Journey and PCS pages to help supported businesses, and we are working to publish a new ministerial endorsed public sectors buyer’s guide document for supported businesses.

The number of supported businesses has increased during the year from 16 to 23.

The public sector already spends around £22.8 million with supported businesses but we would like to spend more.

Our National Collaborative Procurement team are busy, continuing to progress their Service Enhancement Programme, which is now published on our website and work is already underway to improve how we collaborate with customers and deliver services that offer even greater value for customers and communities across Scotland.

Our collaborative teams also publish a quarterly newsletter, which provides a full update on everything that is happening in this space. You’ll find these on our Scottish procurement blog.

And following a successful period of collaboration between the construction industry  and the public sector. We launched the first Civil Engineering Dynamic Purchasing System for projects of up to £5 million.

Scottish public sector organisations can now issue calls for competition under the DPS, using an entirely electronic process to award civil engineering contracts.

And not forgetting, the National GO Awards, which will be taking place on the 21st of May. It’s time to get your entries in, and it’s a great opportunity to really showcase the innovations, initiatives and achievements that have been delivered by public  procurement professionals in Scotland. Deadline for entries is Monday 24th of March, so there’s still plenty of time to get your entries in.

Well, that’s all for now.

I’ll see you in June with another quarterly update.

Thank you very much.