Earlier this week, a senior Government official asked us what impact the proposed changes to the UK public procurement would have on CIPS studies and our Commercial Apprenticeship programmes. Fortunately, irrespective of this week’s announcement about the UK General Election, this is unlikely to affect your CIPS studies and it will not affect any CIPS exam assessments. Below, we give you a little more detail, albeit purely from a CIPS learning perspective.
As many of our UK public sector learners are aware, statutory public procurement regulations have been under review ever since the ratification of the UK’s exit from the EU in January 2020. This culminated last year with the Procurement Act 2023 which was due to be supported with secondary legislation in readiness for a 28 October 2024 ‘go live’ date. This has been referred to as “Transforming Public Procurement” (TPP).
It’s been a long drawn-out affair, but in effect this implementation would mean that any public sector procurement in the UK from the 28 October onwards would be need to comply with this new legislation and the old (current) regulations would only be effective for legacy (run-off) contracts.
The Prime Minister’s election announcement means that the UK Parliament in prorogued (discontinued) as of today and so the plans for TPP have the potential of being disrupted until the next UK government. To date, briefings from the UK’s Cabinet Office have encouraged everyone still to plan for a ‘go live’ date of 28 October, but there is some discussion in the press of potential delays.
So What?
As many of you know, CIPS has been working over recent years to give their syllabus learning content a more global and accessible application. The CIPS professional qualifications should no longer be considered to be just UK qualifications (although CIPS is predominantly based in the UK and regulated by Ofqual, the UK qualifications regulator). Their qualifications are now international.
To achieve this, CIPS has removed UK-specific references from its syllabus. On top of this, the CIPS study guides have been reviewed and edited to try to remove the excessive references to UK examples.
This means that if you are writing a constructed response (CR) essay-based exam answer, you do not have to quote UK public procurement legislation, you could quote the relevant legislation from any country.
It also means that CIPS exams will not ask specific questions on the content of UK legislation or UK public procurement regulation.
“Whoopee,” you might be thinking! In short, this means the change of statutory public procurement legislation will have no effect on your CIPS studies, the learning content and nor on your CIPS exams.
Do I need to know about the UK public sector regulatory changes?
Given they will not be assessed in a CIPS exam, you could be forgiven for ignoring these developments (particularly if you work in the private sector). However, as a student of procurement and someone who wants to learn as much about our profession and how it applies across multiple sectors, you might want to take some time to learn more about the proposed changes.
Transforming Public Procurement is about how legislation can address some of the modern-day challenges faced by the public sector when managing commercial processes, such as procurement. From a strategic perspective, this is immensely challenging and complex.
Important issues such as transparency, equal treatment, sustainability, market economics, probity and the balance of commercialism with social value need to be understood and applied through these changes in statutory regulation.
Fortunately the UK’s Cabinet Office has prepared some useful bite-sized eLearning to introduce you to the forthcoming changes, whenever they do occur.
Closer to the time of implementation, Cordie will also be changing its suite of public procurement training courses in response to customer demand.
These are exciting times for anyone working and studying procurement in the public sector! But, in answer to questions about CIPS studies, we just continue to focus on the current learning content and there will be no disruption from these proposed legislative changes.