The new UK Public Contracts Regulations came into force yesterday, 26th February 2015. As we’ve commented in other posts on this blog the regulations impose some new statutory obligations on public sector bodies which are designed to increase the number of small and medium sized companies bidding for and winning public contracts.
The two most major changes that are having an immediate impact on public bodies are:
- All contracts with a value estimated to be greater than £25,000 (£10,000 for central government) have to be advertised on the Crown Commercial Service website Contracts Finder. This requirement doesn’t just apply to contracts between £25,000 and the European threshold of £172, 514 (£111,676 for central government), it also applies to notices published in the Official Journal (OJEU), so procurement officers will have to enter the information on one system for the OJEU and then on another system for Contracts Finder. To add to the confusion you are not allowed to publish an OJEU notice on Contracts Finder until it has been published in the Official Journal.
- The second change is an obligation to make all of the procurement documents available online at the same time as the contract notice is published. The term ‘procurement documents’ is defined quite widely and is intended to include the full tender specification and all the supporting documents, not just a pre-qualification questionnaire, so that any interested supplier can understand the full requirements before deciding to proceed.
myTenders Pro, which is managed by Millstream who also run Tenders Direct, takes the pain out of these two new obligations.
- Using mytenders Pro to compile and publish contract notices means they can automatically be submitted them to both Contracts Finder and the Official Journal without the information having to be typed in twice and all of an organisations contract notices can be managed and controlled in one easy to use and low cost service (Regulations 106 & 110).
- Public bodies can also provide unrestricted and full direct access free of charge to the procurement documents from the date of the publication by making them available to download from myTenders (Regulation 53).
- Suppliers can submit their completed bids in a secure online postbox which allows procurement officers to reduce the minimum timescales of OJEU procurement but also to prepare for the statutory requirement to conduct fully electronic eprocurement (Regulation 22, not mandatory until October 2018).
We first developed the myTenders procurement portal in 2002 and it now powers Public Contracts Scotland, and Sell2Wales as well as introducing electronic tendering in Ireland and Norway with the eTenders and Doffin websites. The system is in regular use by 11,000 procurement officers and more than 140,000 suppliers, so it has been very thoroughly field tested. We take the hassle out of publishing over 10,000 OJEU notices every year for our public sector customers and a further 25,000 notices for contracts under the OJEU threshold, mini-competitions, etc.
Our dedicated UK help desk provides unlimited support by phone or email to both public sector procurement staff and also their prospective suppliers. Our friendly and knowledgeable staff have years of experience and many are qualified to postgraduate level in the policy and law of public procurement.
Our Information Security system is accredited to ISO 27001 and we are a supplier on the Government’s G-Cloud 6 digital marketplace.
If you are a public sector purchasing officer and are interested in finding out how myTenders Pro can take some of the pain out of these new obligations give us a call on 0844 561 0670 or click here to find out more.
