Where’s Our McClelland Report?

Given the combination of expenditure levels, complexity, vulnerability and criticality to operations, it should be expected that extremely high priority be given to procurement by the most senior levels of management and others responsible for governance within public sector undertakings.


In addition, it is obvious that those involved in the day-to-day conduct of procurement operations have an important and highly professional role to perform. The procurement function and its organisation should be regarded as one of the most important in the undertaking and its status should rank with that of other professional functions such as finance. Indeed, given its dynamism, variability and external perspective, not only should those involved have the backing of professional training and accreditation they should preferably have interpersonal skills which support their externally facing roles as the delegated legal and commercial representatives of their organisations as they place business with suppliers. Also, there is a growing requirement for knowledge of and ability to satisfy legal and other corporate and social responsibilities such as sustainability.


I believe that one of the keys to progress is the definition and pursuit of a vision of the ideal model for procurement including its optimum characteristics
.

Truer words, as penned by John F. McClelland in his 2006 Review of Public Procurement in Scotland (known as the McClelland Report), could not be said.

But what I can’t understand, is how these words, spoken for over a decade, by Procurement visionaries, were taken as inspirational by the Scottish people and turned into the success story recounted in the recent CPO Agenda Executive Debate. As per Cuts from the Centre,
which documents the success of the Public Procurement Reform Board ( PPRB ) in Scotland (which is centralizing Procurement in the Public Sector), which was formed in recognition of the importance of procurement by the administration in response to the McClelland Report, In the first two years of the programme, as independently reported by Audit Scotland, there was £327 million attributed to the program itself, and there were further efficiency savings, in
terms of the way we would understand efficiencies, reported through efficient government returns of about £200 million. Given that public sector spending on goods and services across Scotland amounts to about £9 Billion, that’s a saving of over 5%, which isn’t bad at all for a new program in the private sector (which is getting compliance of almost 90% without a mandate).

The public procurement world needs more success stories like this. How do we get them?