My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 477A and 486A in my name. I thank my noble friend Lady Hayman, the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and the noble Earl, Lord Devon, who is not able to be with us today, for their support.
The amendment addresses procurement investigations. It would add, at the end of line 28 on page 60,
“and the implementation of social value”.
It would require the new procurement investigations authority to be able to investigate the implementation of social value. There are regular reports of public bodies that have secured promised social-value outcomes from contractors—apprenticeships, jobs created, investment in local infrastructure and so on—but these are not delivered. As social value is weighted in tenders, organisations can win tenders to deliver social value but may not always deliver the social value that they have promised.
The amendment would give the new procurement investigations authority the ability to investigate whether public bodies were securing social-value commitments that had been promised and to be able to report on that to Parliament. Currently there is no part of government that is bound to collect information on the implementation of social value. Indeed, the Cabinet Office had started to do this for central government through the social value model, but that is not comprehensive. Social value is just as much value as financial value, and the new procurement investigations authority should take social value seriously. This would have the added benefit of increasing awareness of the importance of social value in the public sector.
Amendment 486A would add a new clause. Because social enterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises often complain about barriers to accessing contracts in the public sector, which this Committee has discussed at some length, the proposed new clause would seek to ensure that the new procurement investigations authority
would have expertise from the social enterprise sector and the SME sector so that they could ensure that contracting authorities were carrying out procurement exercises in a way that was fair to the sector.
Despite the Government’s commitment to expanding the role of social enterprises, voluntary organisations and SMEs in winning public sector contracts, that has not taken place. Research by DCMS estimates that only 5% of contracts are being won by voluntary sector or social enterprise organisations. Only one in five pounds of public procurement, 21%, is going to SMEs despite a 33% target. The amendment would give the new procurement investigations authority the expertise to be able to investigate whether contracting authorities were doing what they could to help SMEs and social enterprises to win contracts fairly.