Why should the Public Sector use Buying Solutions?

First of all what is Buying Solutions? It used to be called OGC Buying Solutions and is actually an executive agency of the Treasury department, so amongst PBOs (Professional buying organizations) it is the largest of 40 in the public sector and is an official centrally sponsored Government body. The Office of Government Commerce was set up by the Treasury to effectively help public sector organizations spend efficiently and Buying Solutions was a development of this. Buying solutions sits independently from Treasury though, and has targets and performance measures that ensure it is effective. What it basically does is identify companies for the public sector that offer a quality product at value for money.

I guess that doesn’t sound so complex, a list of companies recommended by the Government for the public sector to buy from. In fact what buying solutions offers is much more complex. Firstly to get on the list the prospective company has to get onto a framework agreement with buying solutions. The remarkable thing about the framework agreement is that it is a fully complaint OJEU tendered process. As part of getting through this process the prospect has to comply with all current quality, environmental, cost, financial and efficiency criteria, not only that elite businesses have in the twenty first century but also benchmarked against the competition. And there is a lot of competition for these framework agreements. As a highly prestigious agreement to have and as it is an OJEU process, the framework agreement is highly advertised and has an enormous number of applicants.

The process of designing the agreement, going through the OJEU process and assessing the candidates to get through to the final few who will be awarded the framework agreement can take up to a year. This guarantees that the selected companies are the best out there.

So the public sector buyer can be confident that he or she is getting product of a high quality and best value. It seems to work, last year Buying Solutions facilitated sales of £5.35 Billion and generated savings of a staggering £732 Million pounds for their public sector users.

But it doesn’t stop there, because Buying Solutions goes through an OJEU process in selecting the companies on its framework agreements, which means that if public sector buyers use the companies on the framework agreements to purchase goods they are automatically compliant with EU legislation on procurement by public sector bodies. This means a professional buyer in the public sector using a Buying Solutions company will not be at any risk of litigation from other supplier companies who could try to assert that EU directives weren’t followed. Issues such as thresholds, standstill periods, syntax in tender documents are not a concern as the companies used are already compliant through the Buying Solutions Framework Agreement with all EU directives.

Sounds pretty good really, companies that have been through rigorous procurement processes already, no complex legislation to consider when purchasing goods. I suppose the real question is, why aren’t all the public sector using Buying Solutions?