The, often born-again, Eurosceptical rising generation around Ed Miliband: the Vice-Chairman of the Labour Party, Michael Dugher (born 1975), writes:
The Government recently confirmed that the German
conglomerate, Siemens, has won the £1.6bn contract to build rolling stock for
the Thameslink line. This decision is a huge blow to Bombardier, the
Derby-based train manufacturer, and a stark example of the Government’s
approach to British industry. Ministers have defended the appalling
decision by citing EU procurement rules, but it is inconceivable that any other
EU country, bound by the same rules, would have made the same decision.
This month also saw the first meeting of Labour’s
new cross-departmental procurement group [which Dugher co-chairs with Chuka Umunna, born 1978], made up of a frontbench shadow
minister from every shadow team. The quality of procurement practise across
the public sector varies markedly and part of the problem is that there is
still a fragmented approach with Whitehall operating in silos. The aim
of the new group is to address this, as well as to develop new thinking to feed
into our ongoing policy reviews. One of the major issues we will be
looking at is the need for more flexibility in relation to EU procurement
rules.
The problems around EU procurement are complex
and far from new. Initially, EU Directives were designed to ensure
transparency and non-discrimination, leading to outcomes which represent good
value for money. But there has been a growing sense amongst British
businesses that when it comes to EU procurement rules, the current system
simply doesn’t function fairly and that our continental neighbours (and
competitors) manage to support their domestic industry in a way that simply
doesn’t happen enough in the UK. This has got to be bad for the British
economy.
In 2004, Gordon Brown commissioned Alan Wood to
look into this area and he produced a report which showed just how one-sided
the procurement rules have been operated. Many British business leaders
quoted in the report spoke of an uneven playing field and how other European
countries were able to fit the specifications of a contract to give a good
chance to domestic suppliers. This explains, for example, why all trains
in Germany are built by Siemens.
In countries like Germany and (above all) France,
contracts are often sliced up into parts so that each slice falls below the
minimum required for compulsory international tendering. There is also
often an important specification that states that as well as considering price,
the final choice has to represent “best value”, a concept which forces
Ministers to take into consideration wider economic, environmental and
strategic industrial factors.
The result is that the single market in
procurement is often a bit of a chimera, with countries tending to support home
industries and domestic taxpayers as much as they can.
The obvious question then is this: why have we
not been acting in the same way in the UK? In Britain, it seems, many of
the problems have stemmed from what might be described as Whitehall's rather
ambivalent attitude towards British industry. For years, civil servants
in Whitehall have too often used EU procurement rules as a basis - an excuse
even - to make recommendations to Ministers that simply do not do the right
thing by the UK.
As the procurement expert Professor Dermot Cahill
said when giving evidence to the new shadow procurement group this month,
purchasers often hide behind EU law as “the problem”. He added that to
start with only 20 per cent of public procurement tenders are large enough to
fall under the EU rule requirements, and that even large contracts are more
flexible than they are sometimes made out to be.
Unfortunately, Ministers in this Government
appear either to share the indifference to British industry or are simply
content to sign off advice without properly challenging their officials.
The Government’s handling of the Thameslink contract is an example of
this attitude. And another scandalous recent example was with the London
Olympics – where out of the 2,717 cars procured to drive officials and athletes
around during the event, only a 360 were manufactured in the UK.
So a complete shift in mind-set is needed in
Whitehall. Public procurement is an important driver for economic growth
and employment and its creative use can help maximise the impact of public
spending. As Ed Balls has said recently, Labour could be set to inherit a
very difficult financial situation in 2015, which will require us to govern in
a different way with much less money around. So how we use procurement to
best effect and best value will become increasingly important.
Ed Miliband and Chuka Umunna have both already
spoken about using the power of procurement to support British innovation and
jobs, calling for large suppliers to offer apprenticeship opportunities on
public contracts as a way of sharing the proceeds of growth. And over the last
few years, the Labour Government in Wales has been successfully moving towards
this wider approach. For example, Dermot Cahill said that the
introduction of “community benefit” criteria in Wales has meant that there is
public value left behind when procurement contracts finish.
This approach is certainly not about being
anti-open competition. It is about being smarter. It is about considering what
is best for the UK, in a wider economic context, when deciding the criteria for
major public procurement contracts and when spending British tax-payers
money.
And despite perceived wisdom, none of this is
incompatible with EU law. Of course, there are technical revisions to EU
procurement rules that will help remove barriers for British businesses trying
to access the European market - and this will be part of Labour’s determination
to drive reform in the EU so it once again works in our national interest.
But crucially, we need to look at why we are not showing the same
ingenuity and flexibility that other EU states currently do.
The irony is that by standing up more for our
national interest, and refusing to be a slave to EU procurement nonsense, our
approach might actually make us more European in that we would be acting in a
way that is more like our European counterparts. The consequence of this
would be Britain left better off.
No comments:
Post a Comment