Small Businesses Could Get Better Shot at UK’s $360B Procurement Spend

Pending U.K. legislation could boost small businesses’ access to the government’s massive pool of procurement money.

The Procurement Bill is designed to make it easier for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to capture more of the country’s $366 billion the government spends on goods and services annually.

“We are making public sector procurement simpler, more transparent and easier to navigate,” Minister for the Cabinet Office Jeremy Quin said in a government news release Monday (Jan. 9). “This Bill will seize the opportunity presented by Brexit to rip up outdated rules, increase opportunities for smaller companies and deliver better value for public money.”

The bill will also boost the government’s ability to exclude suppliers who have underperformed on government projects, as well as those who are “involved in modern slavery — further clamping down on this abhorrent practice.”

A report Monday by the U.K. newspaper The Guardian noted that the opposition Labor Party wants the government to remove several loopholes from the bill, with one party member calling the bill a “charter for cronies.”

The legislation comes as SMBs in the U.K. are facing some serious challenges. As PYMNTS noted late last month, a report from the Financial Times found that under half of small business loan applications in the U.K. were successful in the third quarter of 2022.

Interest rates on the loans that were offered to small businesses have risen as well — with nearly a third of such loans having a rate of 10% or greater. SMBs in the U.K. are also carrying more debt — an additional 36 billion pounds (about $43 billion) — than they were before the pandemic.

“Many small firms now are in a highly precarious position, carrying debts from the pandemic, with the Bank of England raising the base rate, and with funding options getting scarcer and costlier,” said Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) National Chair Martin McTague.

Last year also saw more than 17,000 retail stores close shop in the U.K., according to a Jan. 2 report from The Centre for Retail Research.

That report showed there were 17,145 store closures in 2022, more than in any of the previous four years. Those closures took with them 151,474 jobs.

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