procurement policy, growth and good jobs

policy isn't sexy #1

Growth is increasingly becoming a sexy buzzword in Westminster - it seems that everyone wants it, and everyone wants to be responsible for achieving it, but putting in the work to build a sustainable pro growth approach to policymaking in Westminster is significantly harder, and less sexy than it sounds. The progressive case and approach to the granular elements of this is in my view missing from the overall narrative, and so I hope to fill some of those gaps with a short series of explainers of alternative and existing policy mechanisms that present opportunities for progressive pro growth reform within Britain. You’ll have to forgive the awful writing that accompanies it - policy is my area, comms very much is not.

Amidst the last few months in Westminster, a quiet policy mechanism with significant implications for growth, good jobs, and regional inequality across the UK snuck through almost unnoticed by all but the biggest policy nerds in SW1. The National Procurement Policy Statement (NPPS) was published by Government in mid February this year, and laid out the Governments strategic priorities for public procurement - a £400 billion a year spending programme, of which less than 25% is controlled by central government. The guidance embeds growth, good work, and innovation as key criteria for determining where local councils can spend public procurement money.

Utilising public procurement guidance as a mechanism to support government agendas is nothing new; in the US the Small Business Act requires that a quarter of federal contracts go to small businesses; in the EU the EU Public Procurement Directives allow governments to exclude companies with poor labour practises from public procurement, and prioritises social value in public tenders; in South Korea the Innovative Procurement Policy allows authorities to prioritise start-ups and innovative small businesses with respect to public procurement, and utilises pre-commercial procurement to support R&D in focus industries like robotics, cybersecurity and net zero technology.

In this sense, the NPPS functions as more than just a directive for public sector procurement, and instead as a strategic lever for economic growth, innovation, good work, and regional equality. With public procurement spending by local authorities reaching £300 billion annually, the choices made in awarding these contracts have profound ripple effects across society. Embedding social and economic value within these procurement decisions means that the NPPS has significant potential to transform regional spending and economies.

The NPPS explicitly prioritises small and medium enterprises, and VCSEs in its approach to driving economic growth, acknowledging that smaller businesses have historically struggled to navigate the complex landscape of public procurement, often losing out to larger conglomerates with dedicated bidding teams (the incredible financial and moral pitfalls of which you can read more about here). The NPPS will level this playing field by removing these barriers; opening up competition, and increasing transparency in contracting opportunities. This approach should help to boost local economies by ensuring more public funds circulate within regional supply chains, ensuring economic growth and job creation at a local level.

This new model moves away from our traditional understanding of procurement policy as a solely administrative function, and towards procurement as a driver of innovation. Encouraging contracting authorities to define challenges for solving, rather than solutions for purchasing, is a move towards the successful South Korean procurement model - engaging and enabling businesses to co-develop innovative solutions, prioritising contracts that drive technological advancement, and ensuring that procurement decisions are cohesive in their alignment with the UKs upcoming Industrial Strategy; rewarding R&D spending within the regions and helping to make the UK more competitive on a global stage without wedding our R&D futures to the ever present golden triangle of Oxford-London-Cambridge.

But procurement isn’t just about what local authorities buy, it’s also about how they buy it. The NPPS also mandates that suppliers should ensure that they provide high quality jobs, fair wages, and opportunities for progression for workers. Across the country, particularly in disadvantaged and deindustrialised areas, the UK faces a glut of issues that centre around low pay, insecure contracts, and skills shortages that often arise from a lack of suitable and accessible training programmes within appropriate areas.

While other bigger pieces of legislation and strategy, such as the Employment Rights Bill and Skills England, seek to address these on a macro policy level, requiring that companies provide fair working conditions, skills training, and pathways for worker progression to be eligible for public funding is a significant step towards financially incentivising companies to invest in their workforce, and in building an economy where good work is the norm, rather than the exception.

This should be particularly important for progressives, not just from the obvious lens of workers rights, but also because research suggests that a lack of access to good work and in-work progression heightens feelings of economic alienation, and was a key driver of both ‘pro Brexit’ sentiment during the referendum, and voter swing towards the Conservatives in 2019. Initial data analysis of Reform swing within the last year (source: trust me bro/more seriously: currently undergoing an element of peer review before I very unseriously publish to the substack!) suggests that these factors hold as an explanatory driver of Reforms success, particularly in ‘left behind’ regions of the UK.

Addressing many of the economic disparities that led to the existence of these left behind regions to begin with is another substantial facet of the NPPS. Historically procurement contracts have been concentrated in London and the South East, contributing further to the existing inequalities between regions. The NPPS mandates that contracting authorities consider local and regional growth plans when making procurement decisions. This means more opportunities for businesses and workers in the left behind areas, helping to contribute towards a regional rebalancing of the economy.

Lobbying isn’t sexy, but it’s worth doing regardless

Achieving the kind of policy change that leads to the embedding of these core values and approaches into something like the NPPS is distinctly unsexy - it doesn’t involve flashy comms, or sexy graphics, or passive aggressive twitter threads. Taking one element of this statement as a case study - good work - offers a fair overview of the slog involved in policymaking.

The procurement bill was introduced in 2022, and the first series of good work focussed amendments were tabled by Lord Jim Knight in 2023. They were probing amendments - a particular policy mechanism that involves tabling an amendment that you don’t intend to see carried (i.e. added to the Bill) at all. Instead it’s a mechanism for policymakers to agenda set - to force a discussion on a particular topic, and often to force the government to issue a response to the same, however brief.

In this case the amendments, which outlined the value of procurement policy as a means of promoting government policy and values, and the importance of ensuring that good work was one of those values, led to an agreement from the then Conservative government to consider good work as a required element of public procurement.

Understanding however that the road to legislation is long, and the road to subsequent guidance even longer, the organisation that had drafted these amendments for tabling began working on ensuring the Labour Party had committed to them too, lest the legislative timeline run across governments. Then Shadow Secretary of State for the Future of Work, Angela Rayner, eventually committed to supporting them as a mechanism for promoting good work via procurement, and almost two years later, in February 2025, her government published the NPPS that contained them.

The NPPS is just one small policy mechanism, that on its own will make little more than a moderately sized dent on the bumper of Britains problems with growth and industrial decline. But the nature of policymaking in Westminster is those dents are how change is achieved - even big, sexy, flashy pieces of legislation will take years (often more years than a government has in their term) to bring into play, and even longer to roll out across all of the various policy levers and mechanisms. And if smaller pieces of guidance, regulation and legislation are not aligned with those big sexy pieces of legislative change, then those larger mechanisms will find themselves fighting against a political countercurrent just to survive.

The trajectory of growth in Britain from a policy perspective is an upward one - and while it might be a steep hill to climb, the insider-outsider nature of Westminster means that these smaller positive changes go unnoticed by those who care about the overarching big picture, but are unaware of the smaller jigsaw pieces that comprise it, meaning that the narrative of those outside of the bubble remains unfairly pessimistic about the UK and its future.

There is a serious case to be made for optimism in this regard, and an even more serious case to be made for more people to get on board with doing the unsexy work in this regard. You’re unlikely to be able to fill a venue with twenty-something-year-olds who care about procurement policy, or treasury green book reform, or supply chain due diligence, but those things are worth caring about if you care about achieving growth and better living standards in Britain.