British Small to Medium Enterprises (SME’s) are being forced out of supplying to the Public Sector by procurement policy demands that they cannot afford to implement.
About 20 years ago I worked for the Mayor of London, specifically Transport for London, and in that job I worked closely with the procurement department. Back then there was a huge drive to promote what was called “sustainable procurement”. The idea was to make it easier for local small businesses to supply and work with the various organisations under the Mayor’s remit. So if you needed to award a contract for paperclips, you allowed Bob’s Paperclip Emporium on Finchley Road to bid and you made allowances so that Bob could compete with the likes of Viking. The principle was very simple – to put money back into the community via local small businesses.
The principle spread to paying bills on time. Small businesses don’t have the access to cheap credit that large businesses have and they can literally face ruin if forced onto invoice schedules longer than 30 days. It got so bad around 2008 that in some industries corporates were putting suppliers on to six month payment schedules. The suppliers had little choice but to factor the invoices – to the uninitiated, to borrow money against the invoice, which obviously costs money. It became such a scandal that the Telegraph started to name and shame corporates doing this to their suppliers.
Larger suppliers always have lower costs through economies of scale, but cost isn’t always the reason why suppliers are appointed. Local suppliers often have local knowledge, hands-on delivery, and quick response times when issues arise. You often find more expertise among smaller suppliers. Finally, there is the social aspect, already mentioned. Engaging a supplier that is owned by an international conglomerate is literally sending money overseas. Surely, companies and especially public sector organisations servicing a community should consider their responsibility to that community?
So, why are we increasingly seeing smaller suppliers forced out of supplier relationships, particularly in the public sector?
One of my clients makes highly specialised products for the health sector. It has been doing this for decades and has a great reputation. Its skilled management and workforce means it’s a British success story and, until recently, it has been able to compete with larger suppliers from abroad. It employs about 50 staff in a rural location in the West Midlands and is exactly the sort of business that the Government should be encouraging and, where possible, assisting. It isn’t looking for any favours – its products are excellent and speak for themselves. All it wants is a level playing field on which to compete.
So, why has it withdrawn from the latest Cabinet Office Framework for the supply of its type of products into the NHS?
Firstly, what is a Cabinet Office Framework? The Cabinet Office runs a number of procurement frameworks to support the U.K. public sector.
Let’s say I am a recruitment agency who wants to supply bin lorry drivers into local Councils. I go on to the Cabinet Office Framework website and I look to see if there is an open framework accepting applications to supply. I find the framework specific for the provision of staff into local authorities and then have to jump through a series of hoops to ensure I meet the framework’s requirements. This is demonstrating that you’re a bona fide, solvent business with the right group of policies to meet the demands of the framework. Once I’ve secured one contract, I can bid to supply to any Council bin department looking for drivers who use that framework to help them engage with suppliers. The framework system is essentially there to support public sector organisations so they don’t have to do the donkeywork of checking out their suppliers. The NHS uses them extensively.
Now, you are probably aware that increasingly we have been seeing large organisations impose Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) policies on their suppliers through their procurement policies. Most notoriously, we are seeing quite radical Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) policies and training forced on to suppliers by corporate and public sector procurement teams. The purchasers want to demonstrate their commitment to ‘change’ and one way to do that is to force ‘change’ down through your supply chain by making demands on suppliers that have nothing to do with the product or service being supplied.
This started off as a fairly well-meaning and innocent initiative. For example, it is entirely reasonable to ask a supplier to demonstrate their health and safety policies are up to scratch before paying them to supply a product. It’s reasonable to ask them if they comply with waste disposal polices around toxic substances like asbestos. But it has become a charter for imposing a particular ideology through the supply chain.
If you are a politician who wanted to ‘change things’ in the 1980s or 1990s, you might have become an EU Commissioner. These days, it’s someone like Angela Rayner or Ed Miliband. Let’s say you want businesses to behave in a certain way. Well, here is a ready-made vehicle through which to secure ideological compliance.
And that is exactly what has happened. The framework agreements have been the enforcement arms of the state but also of anyone with an ideological axe to grind. Investment companies like Aberdeen Asset Management (I refuse to call them Abrdn) or pantomime villains BlackRock love them because they allow them to force all sorts of ideological policies – and accompanying training programmes – on their supply chains.
So, what’s the big deal? Surely, it’s all about box ticking? Well, yes and no. You see the procurement departments and the Cabinet Office know about box ticking so they go to great lengths to ensure that your business is compliant. ‘Lengths’ sometimes means forcing bidders to send their management teams for EDI training. It can also mean spending thousands of pounds and many hours writing long and involved ‘Net Zero’ strategies. It always means publishing an anti-slavery policy, even if your legally exempt from having to do so because your business turns over less than £45 million.
This last point is interesting. In the past, the government knew that saddling small businesses with unnecessary red tape undermines their ability to compete with larger businesses. The anti-slavery policies are there to make sure that you are doing everything possible to ensure that the products you are buying from overseas aren’t being made by slaves. As most businesses with a turnover of under £45m are not directly dealing with suppliers in this category, those businesses have been given a legal exemption in an attempt to level the playing field and make them more competitive.
Only the Cabinet Office are insisting that all bidders on their framework have an anti-slavery policy, regardless of size.
Last year, my client pushed back when an NHS trust insisted he send his senior management team to them for two days in the middle of a working week to take their EDI course. It wasn’t enough to have your own EDI policy. No, the client – in this case, an NHS trust – wanted to make sure your team had been indoctrinated with its ideological beliefs. The sheer hubris here is astonishing, but most staggering is how removed from the reality of commercial life you have to be to expect a small business to send three of its top people on a training course, half way across the country in the middle of a working week. Six man days, travel, hotel, the impact of them being out of the company. It’s essentially a whole week’s production, business development and administration down the drain to massage the egos of an NHS Trust leadership team who are probably chasing a gold star from Stonewall or similar.
And don’t for one minute think that you can get away with simply adding the training costs to the bill. This comes out of your pocket.
The final straw for my client was when the framework managers demanded an involved and detailed Net Zero strategy demonstrating how his business planned to become Net Zero over the next five years. This had to include figures, business plans, supplier choices, etc. He put his foot down and said no. He demonstrated how much it would cost him to produce such a document: over £20k in either his company’s time or, more likely, external consultancy fees, i.e., you pay a bunch of recent university graduates to write the documents for you.
So, he’s withdrawn from the framework, leaving it to large corporations who have departments whose only role is to churn out such policies and who have teams in their sales departments who are specifically there to win bids on frameworks.
My question for Ms. Rayner and others in the Government is this: “How do you expect small businesses to compete when you load them with so much red tape that it places them at a significant disadvantage to corporations?”
I won’t hold my breath for an answer because Labour have already stated that they intend to make EDI training and policies mandatory in Public Sector procurement. So at a time when the FTSE100 and 250 are pulling back on EDI, at a time when across the world, and in the USA, we are seeing employers dump DEI/EDI and U turn on the politicisation of the workplace, the UK Government is doubling down.
And what about my client? Well, NHS Trusts are so far not obliged to buy through the Cabinet Office Frameworks. They tend to though because it makes life a bit easier, but if you have a product or service they require they can buy it directly from you, it just involves a bit more work. Yes, they usually demand the same paperwork from you, but at least you can sit down with a human being and explain why you won’t be producing it and they can then decide whether they still want your product enough.
Cabinet Office Framework agreements are making life impossible for small to medium suppliers. Where ‘sustainable procurement’ once meant putting money back into the community by engaging with local suppliers, it now means ESG, EDI, interference, red tape and, of course, costs all of which make it very difficult for any smaller supplier to compete.
He’s now engaged with his MP but I wouldn’t hold my breath as the new government has demonstrated that it either has no interest in helping small to medium enterprises, and is following a series of policies that effectively transfers revenue from SMEs to corporate suppliers or they are so detached with the realities of running an SME in the UK in 2025 that they are making error after error.
Either way, it is yet another example of the egregious treatment SMEs are facing at the hands of the State.
C.J. Strachan is the pseudonym of a concerned Scot who worked for 30 years as a Human Resources executive in some of the U.K.’s leading organisations. Subscribe to his Substack page.
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What chance do these young folks have?
Second, probably 3rd generation since Blair’s tide of political correctness destroyed Britain’s Christian traditions, they get all their information from Big Tech, indoctrinated in wokism, green fear.
The cure is the Gospel, the power of God for salvation, and something I pray for often.
Amen brother. ‘Let your hearts not be troubled….’ When pagan weather worship, viruses and mindless entertainment replace reality and truth, the demon’s get busy.
You’re not wrong, Neil. Christianity places one’s centre outside oneself – your identity is found in Christ, and your concern is directed to others. Paradoxically the self prospers under those circumstances.
The focus on autonomy leaves each individual struggling to define himself/herself, and the societal stress on mental health (not least from the Royal Family) reminds them that they are bound to fail. The proof of the pudding is that the more mental health facilities there are, the more mental health issues there are (not to mention the inevitable inability of the facilities to keep up with demand during COVID etc).
A parallel is the collapse of sexual health, in every way, the more sex education has been provided in order to guarante “sexual health.”
“…your identity is found in Christ, and your concern is directed to others.”
Like, my wife and children. Family. My employer. My neighbour.
I don’t need no imaginary friend, brother.
The younger generation clearly do, though, which was my only point.
They need friends in the real world. Girlfriends, boyfriends, you know, usual stuff. Not imaginary friends, either of the tiktok variety or any other type.
And the epidemic of pan-relationship breakdown can be readily traced to the increased insistence down the years that “authenticity” is only to be found in the self. The fact that nature in many cases overcomes social conditioning is hardly surprising, but when 40% of US students identify as not embracing “the usual stuff” something has gone very wrong indeed.
But since the Enlightenment that conditioning has included the dogma that leads to the supercilious “imaginary friend” tropes that fly in the face of the experience of most of the human race, but seek to mock it.
The experience of most of the human race was for at least two years that COVID-19 was/is a deadly pandemic. Be careful when you ally yourself to the majority.
No. The light shines from within, don’t look to false idols for salvation. I believe this was Jesus of Nazareth’s message, and if he were alive today he would be dismayed to find that he’d been turned into a false idol. He was a human, telling you to find freedom. It’s the man in the mirror, friend. The man in the mirror.
As a matter of pure interest, when did you last study Jesus of Nazareth’s message, because I haven’t found what you say in his teaching over the last 58 years? I did find that teaching on a Jethro Tull album, but as a scholar I don’t find that solid evidence.
And if he weren’t alive today, I wouldn’t bother with his teaching at all as he would have proven himself a liar.
Jesus of Nazareth has been demonstrably dead for almost 2,000 years already, I am not sure how he could be teaching you or anybody anything over just the last 58!
That contentious assertion is the one at issue, of course. But it was settled for those who followed Jesus’s teaching by the time the letter to the Galatians was written, some eighteen years after the crucifixion.
I’d still like a source for the revised Jethro Tull reading of his teaching, though. Scepticism, I’ve always felt, requires evidence, not mere assertion.
You have evidence for the resurrection?!
Of course I have heard of Jethro Tull but I know nothing about what he has said/sung/written about anything.
I am happy to admit that my opinions about what Jesus of Nazareth’s true message was are just that – opinions. I am not dogmatic.
During the Covid experience I found the people who were the most resilient and steadfast were people of faith. Not pointing to any particular religious administration here, but people who were guided by scripture, and had a strong moral compass.
I’m not religious myself, but have to say I’m impressed by people who have genuine faith and who show consideration for others.
It seems our modern society is so shallow and self-centred – are there forces deliberately conspiring to bring people down?
Look at media such as the Daily Mail, with its constant diet of crass celebrity culture, cosmetic surgery, a stream of people taking selfies. And television with repeat after repeat of depressing crime/police dramas, and abysmal ‘reality’ programs etc.
Where is the uplifting programming encouraging people to live a virtuous life? (Not virtue-signalling and wokeism…)
So many people have lost touch with the natural, and we’re all awash in the digital age.
There are of course many benefits of the digital era, but not when it’s being dominated by malevolent forces.
We seem to be in steep decline and fall…is there any way to turn this around?
A good stint in the f#=king army would do them more good that church!
Yet it was my Pastor’s army experience (including a stint in Afghanistan) that led him to seek and find God.
And my grandfather’s 4 years on the Western Front (West Kent Regiment) left him with 70 years of post-traumatic damage, from which he only found peace, through God, in his final illness.
Life is never simple, is it?
These kids need a more sturdy grounding in reality, mainly from parents, its not all about a shoulder to cry on! Spare the rod and spoil the child.
(I won’t get into religion, your belief in whatever god is in your head alone, and should remain there, never to be pushed onto others! That’s caused countless wars through out history!)
That’s quite funny that you should quote the Bible ( ‘spare the rod…’ ) and then say you ‘won’t get into religion’!
I ain’t a fan of military conscription. Turns the bad guys evil and the good guys into drunkards.
Professional soldiers is where it’s at.
Interestingly, Grandad was a professional. Signed up early 1918 as a volunteer. As was Great Uncle Jack, killed in the BEF that October. The Ukraine experience shows that professional armies get depleted pretty rapidly in wars of attrition. I guess in an ideal world that would make everyone pack up and go home, but we’re in the real world.
Amen. As I like to say, conscription is a Machiavellian solution in search of a problem.
A society, nay, a civilisation, that loses God is doomed. History shows that. A unifying belief shattered, and now everyone is their own God.
What’s your definition of ‘God’?
Good question, godknowsimgood.
“There are thousands of gods, but have no fear – yours is the best!”
Sorry, Cobblers! Animals don’t need God’s and they get on alright, keeping the balance of nature not God!
I’m done with this silly string.
Agreed, me too! Don’t do dogma either.
My karma ran over my dogma.
Interesting and depressing. Author’s analysis is spot on – these people are basically losers – told to be losers by state education, media and ‘influencers’. As he says they spend way too much time in the virtual world, ‘study’ horseshit courses, have low self esteem, few hobbies, few interests, not many have done any real work and most come from broken or indifferent families. Well done ‘modern world’, ‘the age of ‘science” etc.
The author does not mention climate b.s. or the rona fascism – it is pretty clear that the fascists that run our world are targeting young people with ‘crises’. The woman who won’t go in person to see this prof suffers from being a Rona retard – terrified of the world and viruses (if they exist).
I read yesterday that a majority of Dutch women don’t want to give birth in order to save Gaia – the pop there is 15 million, 1/2 the size of Shanghai. That kind of f*ing stupid is special and is from indoctrination + the inability to think.
U 25s are a mentally ill lot – many of the Tranny’s or women with penises spring from this cohort, not all, but many.
Who promised them life would be easy?
I’ve been through enough in my time but my parents and previous generations lived through wars and poverty! and many, who didn’t hit the jackpot by being born in a modern western county, still do.
God help them!
I’m a late Baby Boomer. I had a very similar childhood to the one my mother experienced: largely free range and out of the house much of the time with friends; warned about dangers but trusted not to get into trouble and slightly scared of being found out doing something I shouldn’t; encouraged to “do my best” but not put under too much pressure to achieve.
Compared to today, we didn’t have many material possessions, either as a family or individually. We got a small family car when I was about age 7; for periods we didn’t have a TV because it had broken and they either couldn’t afford or didn’t bother to replace it; we had no family telephone until I was in my mid-teens.
But we were happy. My mother was around most of the time – just getting a little part-time job when I was about 10.
I did my best to give my two sons a similar upbringing. The only difference being, I did it as a single mum since my husband absented himself when they were very young. They are confident; successful; happy.
The problem with today’s snowflake generation started when the Government effectively forced mothers to return to work and put their very young children into (often) poor quality childcare and then proceeded to both molly-coddle and indoctrinate them throughout their formative years.
They have had no anchors in their lives and no resilience.
Spot on RTSC!
Dad goes to work and mums stays home to look after the kids. I know that sounds old fashioned but I’m glad it was the way I was brought up, grounded in reality!
Just as today, all kids seem to have some kind of allergy! I cannot even remember any of my schoolmates ever mentioning nut or lactose allergies etc it just didn’t happen, same with mental problems, they seem to be a recent phenomenon!
Learn to play the Saxaphone, the Guitar or Keyboards. Trust me, all your phony malady’s will vanish into thin air. ——Oh, and by the way, stop walking down every street staring at your silly phone. Use the technology but stop letting it use you instead. ——–If you happen to be tone deaf, don’t worry, just join a sports club or a football team.
Music lessons are white supremacist, hadn’t you heard?
As my kids tell me; “Dad, if there isn’t something wrong with you, then there’s something wrong with you!”
Is you kid Jack who writes here, by any chance?!
Most of us are dysfunctional to an extent and being aware of that and taking practical steps to become less so would seem helpful to me, but there’s a fine line between that and excessive navel-gazing and wallowing in it. In former times, people had more pressing matters to worry about – it seems like a rich-world phenomenon to me. Probably things will have to swing too far the other way, leading to a collapse, before we swing back again.
In the 30’s and 40’s people were too busy surviving to be depressed. My grandfather worked 50 years in a Coal Mine, raised 5 kids and had a huge vegetable garden full of potatoes, carrots, leaks and cabbage. —-As you ay “More pressing matters to worry about”.
I don’t see how it could possibly be worse than I feared – that’s because I fear the total destruction of socoety as we know it.
Behaviour is taught.
The current woke, victimology, mental health is all down to training, enabling and the example set by those in positions of power and influence.
About 10% of youngsters ingest harmful chemicals of one sort or another, have been doing so for many years now.
As we know from the behaviour of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, this, probably more often than not, leads to genuine mental health problems.
And the bad news is that this condition of psychotic disorder is already prevalent among the professional classes – doctors, teachers, lawyers, accountants, architects, civil servants.
That is why things are already interesting, and not in a good way.
My sister and I have nine adult kids 20 to 32 between us. Eight are on ADHD and/or anxiety meds. Only one, as far as I can tell, needs the ADHD meds. All are successful, and for my sister, giving ADHD pills to her kids was akin to giving speed to soldiers to improve their performance. Ridiculous. What all these meds will do to their brains long term, I don’t know.
More on the state of the modern university: My 27-yo daughter teaches several sections of a required freshman writing class at a large Midwestern US university. She says the students skip class frequently, don’t do the reading assignments, ask for extensions, and overshare during class discussion (“I didn’t read the assignment but let me tell you about what’s going on in my life.”) Students can get accommodations if they have ADHD but she hasn’t seen a request because of an anxiety diagnosis. To ensure they don’t use AI or otherwise cheat on their writing assignments, the first assignment for next semester will be to write a personal narrative, not that they need an excuse for navel-gazing….
I struggle to believe that they can be worse the snowflakes who ‘grew-up’ in the 1960s and spent their lives convinced the state, and particularly the NHS, would always look after them, that the BBC and The Guardian were infallible sources of truth, that Communism was a really great idea in-spite of Stalin, Mao and the Khmer Rouge, that anyone who suggested scaling back the role of the state was a selfish, evil Tory, that religion was simply a means of controlling people, that scientists never lie and Science would solve all societies ills, that they’d soon be travelling to other planets, that their generation was far more enlightened than any that went before (or came after), that shutting down major parts of the economy was an appropriate reaction to not getting what they what, that publicly vilifying anyone who happened to be rich or in a position of authority and dismantling old institutions, however noble, was their duty. By contrast, today’s youth have had endure being locked-in their rooms for months on end just in case it might prolong the life of a baby-boomer, force-fed all manner of woke BS by their elders, coerced into taking on enormous debts to pay for the baby-boomers lifestyles, offered sex change operations by the NHS and forced to watch drag shows whilst still children, offered little by way of societal support or opportunity. It’s time the Baby-boomer snowflakes stopped blaming the Millennials and took responsibility for the dystopia that they had created over the past sixty years.
Yup, Boomers had it all! Income tax starting at 35% and mortgage interest rates of 15%!
The fact that half of the young people at university would be more suited to a traditional apprenticeship hardly equips them for the level of mental disciplines needed to attain worthwhile degrees.
I suspect that cancelling at such short notice means that she’d over-slept and wouldn’t have made the meeting on time. Mental health is too often the ”get out of jail” card. A solution could have been to cancel the meeting completely as her mental state means that she wouldn’t be strong enough to receive the ”constructive criticism” she would be receiving. Asked the student to re-confirm when she is ”strong” enough to attend a face-to-face meeting to receive this ”constructive criticism”. I’m a great believer in ”tough love” as we are not doing young people any favours by pandering to excuses. Companies here may have gone woke but try this on internationally (particularly in Asia) and you’d soon be losing your credibility and their business.
We, as a society, are afraid of saying you must be tougher to get through life, and each person must accept responsibility for their life instead of blaming others.
If my wife and I were starting out now, im
not sure we’d have children. The world is going to shit and it seems there’s nothing that can stop it. Great article. Totally agree with it entirely.
Agree Simon, but those of us who bring up their kids to be personally responsible and tough, will produce the future leaders, who will hopefully reverse this maddening spiral into obscurity!