This article is an excerpt from The Art of Tendering: A Global Due Diligence Guide, which is available for purchase.
In its March 2013 report Police procurement, the United Kingdom National Audit Office found that a lack of centralization in police procurement left untapped opportunities for cost savings and efficiency. As the report noted, the “43 police forces in England and Wales procure a wide variety of goods and services”, ranging from “uniform and police cars to estate and facilities management services”. The report also found that in 2010 to 2011, “a total of £1.7 billion” were spent on “all goods and services”, excluding technology, representing approximately 13 percent of total police force expenditures. The report also noted that funding for police services had increased “in real terms by 49 per cent” in the prior 15 years, which underscored the importance of properly managing police-related procurement spending. To reduce duplication and inefficiency, the report stated that the government wanted to end the “culture of police forces procuring goods and services in up to 43 different ways” and had set the target stipulating that at least 80 percent of non-technology police procurements would go “through regional or national frameworks and contracts by 2014-15”.
In support of these centralization objectives, the report observed that “seven forces reported in our survey that they did not have sufficient staff and resources to undertake procurement activity effectively” and, with respect to duplication, “found a minimum of nine separate specifications for each of five common items of equipment used by police officers.” For example, the report noted that police forces “found it particularly hard to agree on common specifications for uniform, [on] which they spent almost £8 million in 2010-11”, and that if the police forces replicated the savings that were previously achieved through the standardization of prison uniforms, they would save approximately £2.6 million per year.
In addition, the report found an inherent tension between the central government’s decentralization efforts, where there is a policy of deferring to local government autonomy, and the central government’s efforts to better co-ordinate police procurement activities. As the report stated, “[t]his type of oversight regime limits the amount of information available to the Department to direct their interventions and weakens the levers available to enforce the Department’s initiatives.” In fact, the report found that “there is no comprehensive data on police procurement” and that the central government’s “attempts to collect data have met with limited success, reducing its ability to improve value for money nationally.” The Auditor General determined that the central government was “not, therefore, well placed to identify and share good practice, or keep track of what savings police forces are making, and how they make them.”
The report concluded that the central government’s “light touch” approach to local government oversight undermined its ability to assure the taxpayer that the £1.7 billion spent by the police service on non-technology goods and services achieved value-for-money. The report therefore recommended that the government “review and map out the current governance structure for all police expenditure, including procurement”, and document lines of accountability to streamline future spending arrangements. As this report illustrates, central governments cannot achieve efficiencies through the centralization of procurement if they are unwilling to co-ordinate top-down central purchasing. To the extent that purchasing decisions and related planning and budgeting is left to local levels, centralized purchasing will be more of a theory than a practice.
