Scottish procurement: open contracting strategy

Strategy to enable us to publish information about our procurement exercises, ensuring greater transparency on how we spend public money.


Existing obligations

Open Government Partnership Scottish National Action Plan 2016-17

As part of our Financial Transparency commitments, we will:

Develop an open contracting strategy to support the publication of procurement and commercial reporting information in a manner that is accessible to all, while taking advantage of developing data standards.

Legislation

There are also a number of pieces of legislation which require the Scottish Government to publish information:

Recent procurement legislation has also increased the obligations on all public bodies to publish procurement information. This includes the requirements contained within:

Code of Practice and Strategy

The Scottish Ministers' Code of Practice recommends that, as a matter of best practice, we should publish information related to the transparency of public funds and demonstrable diligence in managing contractors to ensure best value for money. This includes how much money is being spent and with whom, any cost benefit analysis that has been undertaken and suitable checks and balances are in place to ensure proper monitoring of project performance.

The Scottish Government Open Data Strategy recommends that we publish all data in a format of 3* or above (of the universally recognised 5* open data schema proposed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee) by 2017.

Contact

Back to top