Public Procurement and Property

Scottish Procurement Vlog – June 2025

June 25, 2025 by Teigan Kelly No Comments | Category Procurement news, Scottish Procurement

Our Director Nick Ford returns with his second vlog of 2025!

In this latest vlog, Nick provides an overview of the last quarter with achievements and updates from across the Scottish Procurement and Property Directorate. Nick also touches on upcoming events over the next few months across the Scottish procurement community.

You can find out more in the video below. A transcript has also been made available at the bottom of the page.

More information on the topics Nick has covered can be found in the links below:

• Public Procurement Strategy for Scotland – two years on update
• Annual report on procurement activity in Scotland 2022 – 2023
• Reserving contracts for supported businesses – SPPN 1/2025
• SPPN 2/2025: annual procurement reports for 2024 – 2025
• Public Contracts Scotland
• PCS – Tender
• Procurement: SME and third sector action plan 2024-2026 – gov.scot
• Scotland Innovates
• Procurex Scotland 2025
• Go Awards Scotland

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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.

Welcome to my second vlog of 2025, where I’ll be highlighting what we’ve achieved over the last quarter of the year, and taking a look at what’s coming up over the next few months.

We recently published our Public Procurement Strategy for Scotland two years on update.

To remind you all, the intention of the Public Procurement Strategy for Scotland is to provide a high level vision and roadmap for Scottish public procurement, which all public sector bodies can align to and deliver against.

It provides a clear vision and focused direction that puts public procurement at the heart of a sustainable economy to maximise value for the people of Scotland.

And to mark the second year anniversary, we introduced a set of eight Key Performance Indicators that will help us to measure progress against the strategy’s vision.

These KPIs aim to demonstrate the value and impact of procurement activity across Scotland.

Measurement of this strategy will support the development of initiatives, practices and policies to enable the public procurement profession in Scotland to deliver innovative approaches, whatever comes our way in the future.

Our sixth annual report on public procurement activity in Scotland was published in April. It’s a cracking document providing an overview of public procurement activity across Scotland for the financial year 2022 to 2023.

The report shows how Scottish public bodies used their spending power to generate a range of positive economic, social and environmental benefits for individuals and organisations across the country. The impactful figures in these reports really do showcase the real power of procurement.

And a massive thank you to all of you as Heads of Procurement for publishing your annual procurement reports. These are a rich source of information for buyers and suppliers.

We’ve also recently published two new Scottish Procurement Policy Notes. SPPN 1/2025 provides updated advice on reserving contracts for supported businesses and SPPN 2/2025 provides details on how public bodies should notify the Scottish Minister of the publication of their annual reports covering the financial year 2024/25.

Our Source to Contract programme is looking at the opportunities within the market to bring in a new Public Contracts Scotland and Public Contracts Scotland Tender all together as one system, bringing these systems together as one service provides an opportunity to improve on both the buyer and the supplier user experience, by simplifying processes and reducing duplication.

A project steering board has been established in May, with representatives from across the Scottish public procurement sector. This provides a great opportunity to gain insights into the approach and knowledge of the extensive market engagement we have undertaken. We will keep Heads of Procurement updated on the progress.

In the first week of June, we attended the 16th Meet the Buyer National event. A great day spent at Murrayfield. These events provide excellent opportunities to network with procurement teams and suppliers from across the public and private sectors.

The event had a real buzz all day. Whether you are a micro, a small or medium sized supplier, Meet the Buyer events can help you get into public sector supply chains.

As part of Scotland’s SME and Third Sector Procurement Action Plan, we held a small and medium-sized enterprises roundtable providing the opportunity to hear from organisations on their experience with public procurement.

These roundtables are key to understanding barriers and working together to remove them. Along with the Supplier Survey results, we will be looking at the feedback from this to see what else we can do to continue removing perceived barriers to public procurement.

Our first Scotland Innovates newsletter was issued at the end of April. Scotland Innovates, is our national supplier led innovation service, which allows suppliers to connect with and submit proposals for innovative goods and services to the entire Scottish public sector.

You can sign up to receive the newsletter to stay up to date with the latest news, events and case studies from Scotland Innovates through their website.

And then, as we look ahead to the next few months, we will soon publish our update

on the progress of the SME and Third Sector Procurement Action Plan, which sets out our commitment to improving access to public sector procurement for SMEs and third sector organisations.

Progress against the plan is overseen by a dedicated working group and is structured around the three key themes: oversight and communication, policy and practice and systems and tools.

The SME round table that we hosted at Meet the Buyer is just one example of how we are delivering on our commitment to creating a range of opportunities for engagement with SMEs and third sector partners.

This October marks the 20th anniversary of the Scottish Government Conference held at Procurex.

This year will be different as we have made the conference free for public sector buyers to attend. So please make sure you sign up.

This is the premier event for suppliers and public sector professionals dedicated to transforming Scotland’s economy through innovative and sustainable procurement practices.

We are already working on what I hope to be an exciting agenda, so don’t miss out on the opportunity.

We will also have this year’s Go Awards Scotland taking place on the 28th October, featuring four brand new categories.

These awards are a unique opportunity for your team to showcase the innovations, initiatives and achievements that are leading the way for public procurement in Scotland.

Entries for this year’s GO Awards Scotland are now open with a closing date of the 3rd of September. So please make sure to get your entries in.

Well that’s it for now.

To keep up to date with what’s going on, you can follow the blog or follow us on our social media channels. And I’ll be back in September with more updates and reflections.

Thank you all very much.

Tags: Annual report on procurement activity in Scotland, Public Procurement Strategy for Scotland, SPPN

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