Public Sector procurement: SMEs to the rescue

Public Sevice - Cuts in public sector expenditure have certainly led to increased scrutiny of how the government spends public money. A recent report by the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) on the government's IT expenditure emphasised that SMEs could potentially save the government millions of pounds in ITC projects by undertaking projects faster, more efficiently and with lower overhead costs.

The report suggested that the over-reliance of a 'cartel' of large IT firms had resulted in successive governments wasting a massive amount of public money on IT procurement – with some departments spending an average of £3,500 on a single desktop PC. It also found that the government did not have an acceptable level of knowledge of its own IT systems, because the crucial information & expertise had been passed on to the outsourcing suppliers.