Oral Answers to Questions

Miriam Cates Excerpts

Thursday 11th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Metcalfe (South Basildon and East Thurrock) (Con)]

What steps the Government are taking to increase opportunities for small businesses to bid for Government contracts.

[Miriam Cates (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Con)]

What steps the Government are taking to increase opportunities for small businesses to bid for Government contracts.

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

What steps he is taking to reform Government procurement to boost (a) local growth and (b) the small and medium-sized enterprises sector.

--- Later in debate ---

[Julia Lopez]

I agree with my hon. Friend that the opportunities in this space are huge, and we think that our reforms will play a huge role in our post-covid recovery. For too long, complex and opaque procurement rules have benefited bigger and less innovative firms. Our reforms will simplify the current framework of over 350 regulations into one uniform set of rules, and move from seven procurement procedures to three. Our free-to-use digital platform, Contracts Finder, should make it easier for businesses in his constituency to find relevant opportunities. We want to make supply registration far simpler, so that data has to be submitted only once to qualify for any public sector procurement.

[Miriam Cates [V]]

Small businesses in my constituency would like the opportunity to bid for more Government and council contracts, but the current procurement rules are too complex and inevitably favour big firms. Can my hon. Friend assure me that we will be using our new freedom from EU procurement rules to deliver more commercial opportunities to innovative, dynamic SMEs in Penistone and Stocksbridge?

[Julia Lopez]

Absolutely. I know that my hon. Friend, as someone who has run a business herself, understands the bureaucratic frustrations that too many of her constituency businesses come up against. We want public buyers to divide contracts into more accessible lots and allow them to reserve contracts under a certain threshold for small, innovative firms. We are also pushing ambitious targets on prompt payment, and we aim to simplify the bidding process so that it does not favour big firms, which inevitably have greater resources to devote to form-filling and box-ticking.