I take the noble Baroness’s point and understand what she is saying. This takes me back to the opening remarks. We have doubts about the appropriateness of including wider policy objectives, such as those suggested in the noble Baroness’s amendment, in this piece of primary legislation. Each procurement is different, and what is appropriate, for example, for a large-scale infrastructure project, may not be appropriate for a smaller, price-driven transactional arrangement. The strategic priorities that a Government require contracting authorities to have regard to when carrying out their procurement functions are, therefore, better detailed in the national procurement policy statement—which we will debate later in Committee—than in primary legislation.
Amendment 88, tabled by my noble friend Lord Lansley, seeks to require contracting authorities to take into
“account … the size or experience of”
suppliers when determining whether the supplier’s involvement in preliminary market engagement has placed them at an unfair advantage and, therefore, whether they should be excluded from any subsequent procurement. Like other noble Lords who have spoken, my noble friend put forward a thought-provoking point. As I said earlier, I agree with the importance of building capacity among SMEs. We have seen an increase in spending on SMEs in recent years. Figures published last month show that government spending with small businesses rose to a record £19.3 billion in 2020-21—the highest since records began. We hope that the new procurement regime will make it simpler,
quicker and cheaper for suppliers, including SMEs, charities and social enterprises, to bid for public sector contracts, and with lower barriers to entry to the market.
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The noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, made a powerful speech on this, and later in the discussions in Committee we will come, in Clauses 32 and 33, to provisions that reserve certain contracts to supported employment providers and public service mutuals directly benefiting charitable organisations and the people they serve. The Government’s sourcing playbook encourages procurers during preliminary market engagement actively to seek out, as my noble friend was asking, small and medium-sized enterprises that can help improve delivery, as well as voluntary, community and social enterprises. That is important and is in the playbook. The legislation will help SMEs, I say in response to my noble friend Lady Verma, who also made a strong speech. I forgive her for being Leicester; one cannot be Nottingham all the time. It is a wonderful and great city.
Under the Bill, bidders will have to submit their core credentials only once on to a single platform, for example, making it easier for smaller organisations to bid for a public contract. Simplified bidding processes will make it easier and more efficient to bid and increase opportunities for SMEs. Reforms to frameworks will allow longer-term open frameworks, which will be reopened for new suppliers to join at set points so SMEs are not locked out. Dynamic markets, a new concept which we will discuss later in the Bill, will remain open to new suppliers and will, we hope, provide greater opportunities for SMEs to join and win work. We will come back to this issue on later groups. Prompt payment is another important matter. The Government certainly share my noble friend’s aspirations that contracting authorities are able, under the new legislation, to design their preliminary market engagement in a way that gives consideration to small and medium-sized enterprises, but the amendment as drafted risks breaching the equal treatment obligations that contracting authorities owe suppliers by putting smaller suppliers at an unfair advantage. That is a point that my noble friend wishes to challenge us on and we will have engagement on these matters. We will no doubt discuss it before Report.
Amendment 92 from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, seeks to insert a new clause to ensure that for any contract in excess of £1 million a business case is published at least 42 days in advance of a tender notice being published. Again, while we share the noble Lord’s drive towards greater transparency and have worked hard to deliver that, in our view this would create disproportionate burdens for contracting authorities that would outweigh the real-terms transparency benefits. While we would hope and expect that for contracts of that size, contracting authorities would have a clear business case, that is not the same as saying they should be published. Such documents may contain confidential commercial information that the contracting authority might need to keep private, or they might need a public interest test and redaction, which would add to the burden on the contracting authority. In our view, once the burden of publication is balanced against the benefits of the transparency of
the data, there is no overall advantage to requiring publication, but I will reflect very carefully on what the noble Lord has said because in seeking to protect legitimate commercial interests, it may create work as well as opportunity: there is a balance there.