Scottish Government annual procurement report 2023 to 2024

Foreword

I am pleased to present the Scottish Government’s annual procurement report for 2023 to 2024. It demonstrates a strong performance across the reporting year with creativity and collaboration shaping innovative new practices in procurement. With strong foundations in place, we are continuing to evolve, ensuring public procurement remains effective and responsive to economic pressures.

We ensure to align fully to the Public Procurement Strategy for Scotland and adhere to the vision of ‘putting public procurement at the heart of a sustainable economy to maximise value for the people of Scotland’.

The priorities within the strategy requires us to buy in a way which is:

• good for businesses and their employees
• good for places and communities
• good for society
• open and connected

We play a pivotal role in the delivery of these priorities through unlocking significant cost savings, optimising supply chain efficiency and ensuring the delivery of essential goods and services. We want to create a vibrant, dynamic and innovative supply base. One which will help us create jobs, grow businesses, benefit our local communities and deliver on our climate obligations.

Despite the economic environment we are operating in and unprecedented budget pressures across the board, we’re seeing huge progress, benefits and delivering real value for public money. Using our significant spending power to make Scotland a better place to live, work and do business.

We continue to promote economic wellbeing by contributing to quality employment and skills and by providing opportunities for Scottish SMEs, third sector and supported businesses to bid for public contracts and to participate in public sector supply chains. During the reporting year over 54% of the £561 million core Scottish Government spend went directly to SMEs, again highlighting the important role they play in delivering for Scotland.

The spend by core Scottish Government and through our collaborative frameworks by other public sector organisations combined was over £2.1 billion during the reporting year and our contracts and frameworks (across all types of contracting activity) saved the public sector over £141 million, which is testament to the hard work of the teams working to secure Value for Money (VfM). I was really pleased to see the launch of our inaugural national Civil Engineering Framework, which was awarded in March 2024. This project and the follow-on Dynamic Purchasing System are key enablers for the recovery of the sector post-Covid and will also deliver strong sustainability benefits for the public sector.

Let’s continue to realise our ambitions and develop creative solutions that will benefit the people of Scotland.

Nick Ford