Corruption is a particular risk in public procurement and can cause serious loss of public funds as well as undermining trust in public spending.
Ensuring that conflicts of interest do not send contracts to cronies of public officials or politicians, and that corrupt companies are effectively excluded from bidding for public contracts – known as debarment – is essential for protecting taxpayers’ money and the integrity of public procurement. The threat of being excluded from public procurement creates strong incentives for companies to comply with the law and put good policies in place to prevent wrongdoing. Surveys have shown that losing the ability to bid for public contracts is one of the sanctions that companies fear most.
We research and develop recommendations for how to protect the UK’s procurement system from conflicts of interest and how the UK’s debarment and suspension regime in public procurement can be robustly implemented.
This research provides an overview of the rules that the UK’s key allies (the United States, Canada and Australia) have to tackle fraud against the government in their jurisdictions and...
Last week, the government failed to back key amendments to the new Procurement Bill (which had strong cross-party support) that would have significantly strengthened the UK’s ability to tackle fraud...
This submission first examines two key areas of government activity that are particularly vulnerable to fraud and corruption: government-backed loan schemes and public procurement.
In our view, there are several key omissions in the Bill which have the potential to significantly undermine the potential effectiveness of these important reforms.
Spotlight on Corruption has established that 25 of the 50 companies in the government’s ‘VIP lane’ supplied PPE worth £1 billion that was not fit for purpose.
UK needs much stronger rules to prevent new chumocracy scandals. Post-Brexit procurement reform is an opportunity to create a tough national strategy drawing on best practice from US & Canada.28 January 2021
