☛ Want the latest procurement and supply chain news delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for the Supply Management Daily
14 December 2011 | Adam Leach
The National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) is
calling for EU funding to improve buyer’s knowledge and understanding of the
voluntary and SME sectors.
Responding to the European Parliament’s report on modernising
public procurement, the NCVO welcomed the finding that public contracts should
be more accessible to SMEs. However, it concluded that in order to maximise the
impact of any changes, purchasers should be trained to enable them to
understand the breadth of opportunities provided by voluntary organisations.
In October,
MEPs voted in favour of a paper that called for simplified and more flexible
procurement rules to be implemented. One of the
main aims of the reforms is to make public contracts more accessible to SMEs.
The NCVO report recommended that in pursuit of this, the EU should:
“Provide dedicated funding for training on the operations and capabilities of
SMEs and non-profit providers at EU and national levels, for commissioners and
procurement officers to better understand sectors and their suitability for
contract awards.”
In addition it called for administrative and accounting
obligations on SMEs to be eased in recognition of the reduced resources and
spare capacity companies in the sector have compared with large companies. The NCVO,
which represents voluntary and not-for-profit organisations in England, made
the recommendation, in part, after members reported problems in gaining access
to the preferred provider list (PPL).
It argued that the PPL was a good example of “rigid and often
inaccessible” frameworks used in the UK as the lengthy application process, a
lack of advertising of contracts and the resources required to join it placed
an overly burdensome demand on SMEs, with no guarantee of seeing the benefits.
The call for
greater engagement between buyers and the SME marketplaces echoes an
announcement last month by Cabinet
Office minister Francis Maude who said buyers needed to spend more time
familiarising themselves with what the market had to
offer before inviting tenders. “Before procurement
should come commissioning – scanning the market to see what suppliers there are
and what they can offer,” he said. “In future, major procurements should only
take place after we have spoken informally to our potential suppliers. So we
can make swift off-the-shelf purchases where appropriate or quickly choose the
right supplier for the job.”
