Government advised to widen IT supplier pool

Limited list of public sector suppliers restricts competition and should be widened, says PAC

The stranglehold that a minority of IT suppliers have on public sector contracts should be loosened, according to a Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report.

In its report the impact of the Office of Government Commerce’s (OGC) initiatives on the delivery of major IT-enabled projects, PAC said the limited field of IT suppliers potentially restricts competition in the public sector.

“Commercial directors in government departments should select procurement routes that do not present barriers to entry,” said the PAC report. It praised the OGC for the implementation of initiatives to help government departments become better IT purchasers, although the take-up of these initiatives varied.

The OGC told CRN that in the autumn it will launch a National Opportunities Portal with the Small Business Service for advertising public sector tender opportunities , mainly from the Official Journal of the European Union (CRN, 17 January).

“Many businesses have found it hard to find where public sector opportunities are advertised, so the portal should prove useful to them. The OGC is also working to reduce the bureaucracy, time and costs involved in tendering,” said an OGC representative.

Nick Kalisperas, director of trade body Intellect, told CRN: “We want a public sector procurement process that enables smaller IT firms to have a better route to market, with less cost.”

Mike Williams, public sector sales manager at VAR Misco, said: “Tradit-ionally there have been barriers to entry. The problem with the Government Catalogue was too much work for too few suppliers. The new portal should open up the public sector to more suppliers.”

James Adams, senior analyst at Datamonitor, said: “The government likes to stick with the same big name suppliers. I don’t think you’ll ever get the public sector using the small, independent suppliers directly, but they could become involved through subcontracts with larger IT suppliers.”