Andy Burnham was right to say that government has spent too long chasing the cheapest deal rather than backing domestic suppliers to grow stronger, sharpen their offer and deliver more value over time.
But the bigger lesson is not simply about buying more British. It is about changing what Whitehall thinks it is buying. Public procurement is worth well over £300 billion a year and, according to government figures, closer to £400 billion in annual spending. That makes it one o...
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f the most powerful tools the state has for shaping the economy, improving public services and building capability inside government itself.
For too long, success has been judged narrowly: was the contract delivered, and was it delivered at the lowest possible price? What matters just as much is whether a department comes away better equipped to do the work next time. Too often, outside specialists are brought in to rescue a failing project, a digital service or a legacy system, and when the contract ends the knowledge leaves with them. Civil servants are then left dependent on another round of consultancy spending.
That is why the Public Accounts Committee’s warning matters. It recently said the government does not even have a reliable picture of how much it spends on external consultants, with estimates ranging from £1.36 billion to £2.23 billion a year. Without a serious effort to retain skills and transfer knowledge, Whitehall risks staying locked in a cycle of paying for expertise without ever keeping it.
The government has already begun to reshape procurement through its Transforming Public Procurement programme, built around the Procurement Act 2023, which came into force on 24 February 2025. Ministers say the reforms are designed to create a simpler and more flexible system, open the market to smaller firms and social enterprises, and put greater transparency at the heart of the commercial process. New rules have also been introduced to exclude suppliers with a record of poor performance, fraud or corruption.
That broader reform agenda gives Burnham’s argument more traction, but it also shows the practical limits. As industry specialists have pointed out, favouring British-based suppliers cannot simply mean abandoning value for money or bending procurement law. Simon Geale of Proxima has argued that any shift towards domestic suppliers needs clear social value outcomes and fair scoring criteria if it is to be credible and legally robust.
There are, however, examples of how a different approach can work. At HMRC, the UK scale-up Tecknuovo worked with the Borders and Trade team on a modern DevOps platform that, according to the company, allows applications to be deployed 77% faster, with estimated annual savings of £2.25 million and a 30% reduction in cloud consumption costs. The point is not just that money was saved, but that the department was left with a stronger operating model and less dependence on outside support.
That is the kind of result Whitehall should be chasing more often. Procurement should not be judged only on whether a supplier completes the job, but on whether the public sector is left with more skill, more resilience and less reliance on the next contract. If the state is serious about reform, every major procurement should be designed to leave government stronger than it was before.
That would be a much more meaningful test of value.
Source: Noah Wire Services
