Public procurement isn’t sexy. I work with it tangentially in my day job when I need to procure a digital service or product (hello G-Cloud 14), and I always – always – rely on a procurement service to guide me through it.
This isn’t an accident. Procurement is deliberately obscure and technical – it’s meant to be. It’s the Brussels sprouts of government administration: nutritionally essential, utterly unglamorous and guaranteed to make people’s eyes glaze over at dinner parties. Most members of the public don’t understand how it works, and that’s not their failing. It’s simply how boring-but-crucial parts of governance work – like knowing the difference between statutory instruments and primary legislation, or understanding why council meetings follow those peculiar procedural rituals that make PMQs look like a casual chat.
But when politicians don’t understand procurement and try to weaponise it for scandal, we have a problem. And Reform UK has just given us a masterclass in how not to read a government contract.
What public procurement actually is
Before we dive into Reform UK’s spectacular misunderstanding, let’s establish what public procurement actually means. At its core, it’s how public bodies buy things – services, goods, consultancy. But unlike popping to Tesco for your weekly shop, public procurement operates under strict rules designed to ensure fairness, transparency and value for money.
Think of it this way: imagine you’re organising catering for events over the next four years. Rather than phoning around for quotes every time you need sandwiches, you create an approved list of caterers who’ve already been vetted and agreed to your terms. Being on that list doesn’t guarantee them any work – it just means they’re pre-approved to bid when you actually need something. The “framework value” might be £2 million over four years – that’s the theoretical maximum if you used the most expensive caterer for the priciest options at every single event. In reality, you’ll spend a fraction of that, and you might not use some caterers at all.
This is exactly how G-Cloud works for digital services. It’s a framework worth billions, but that doesn’t mean the government is writing cheques for billions. It means approved suppliers can bid for work as it comes up, within pre-agreed terms. The framework ceiling prevents any single supplier from hoovering up everything – it doesn’t guarantee anyone a payday.
Frameworks exist because the alternative would be bureaucratic madness: running a full tender process every time you need a temporary social worker, an interim finance director or a new IT system. They save time, money and administrative effort while maintaining competitive processes and transparency requirements.
Reform’s spectacular misunderstanding
Which brings us to Reform UK’s – now former – chair Zia Yusuf’s social media outburst about Kent County Council. In breathless tones, he declared that Kent had tendered “a contract for recruitment services for £350 million over 4 years,” representing “a staggering 22% of their annual payroll.” The clear implication: scandal, waste, racket.
Except it isn’t a contract – it’s a framework. And it isn’t just for Kent – it’s a national framework that any public body in the UK can access. NHS trusts, other councils, schools, civil service arms-length bodies – the lot. Kent simply hosted the procurement, rather like hosting a buffet where everyone’s invited but you still get blamed when someone complains about the vol-au-vents.
The £350 million isn’t money being spent; it’s the maximum theoretical value across all participating organisations over four years. A ceiling, not a spend. It’s the procurement equivalent of seeing a restaurant’s “Maximum Occupancy: 200 People” sign and assuming they’ve already sold 200 dinners that evening. And the services weren’t just “advertising vacancies and interviewing people,” as Yusuf characterised them, but comprehensive talent sourcing – everything from executive search to compliance, payroll and specialist recruitment across sectors from social care to IT.
Most tellingly, Yusuf’s calculation that this represented “22% of Kent’s payroll” only made sense if you assumed Kent was personally spending the entire £350 million themselves. Which, of course, they weren’t. Because it was a framework. Not an invoice.
Why this matters politically
Now, you might think: so what? Politicians misunderstand technical details all the time. Absolutely fair enough. But this particular misunderstanding reveals something rather more troubling about Reform’s readiness for government.
Public procurement isn’t some arcane corner of administration that politicians can afford to ignore. It’s how government actually works day-to-day. Every major policy initiative, every infrastructure project, every attempt to deliver services relies on procurement processes.
If you can’t distinguish between a framework and a contract – between a spending ceiling and actual expenditure – how exactly are you planning to manage departmental budgets? How will you oversee major infrastructure projects? How will you avoid the kind of procurement disasters that plagued the early COVID response that ended up costing the country £1.4bn?
And no, I’m not expecting politicians to become procurement experts. I’m expecting them to grasp the fundamentals before launching public attacks on supposedly scandalous spending. It’s about recognising when you need to ask an expert rather than reaching straight for the outrage button. If you can’t tell the difference between a budget ceiling and an actual cheque, perhaps stick to commenting on Love Island rather than fiscal policy.
Private companies, incidentally, operate nearly identical systems. Major corporations maintain approved supplier lists, framework agreements and multi-year contracts with spending ceilings. They do this because it works – because the alternative of starting from scratch every time you need something is inefficient, expensive, and risky.
The DOGE parallel
This whole exercise in outrage based on misunderstanding the basics, becomes even more concerning when you consider that Reform has launched its own “Department of Government Efficiency” – a direct copy of the Trump administration’s DOGE initiative.
The original DOGE, despite its social media bluster and grand promises, is fast becoming a cautionary tale about mistaking performative outrage for actual governance. While it very loudly pledged to save trillions, it’s ending up losing more money than it saves through workplace chaos, rehiring costs and avoidable litigation. Its procurement approach is proving particularly disastrous – slashing expertise, bypassing established processes and treating every contract as fraudulent until proven innocent.
The outcome? Pure unbridled chaos, wasted money and systems that collapse exactly when people need them most. Leaders dismiss expertise as ‘bureaucracy’, brand established processes as ‘waste’, and treat complex systems like elaborate scams just waiting for common sense and a chainsaw to expose them.
Sound familiar?
What real procurement scandals look like
Now, I would hasten to add at this point that genuine procurement scandals do exist – but they look nothing like Reform’s manufactured outrage over framework ceilings. Real scandals involve rigged competitions, insider dealing, deliberate exclusion of competitors or contracts awarded to companies with no relevant experience, but excellent political connections. They involve process manipulation, not process misunderstanding.
The COVID “VIP lane” was a procurement scandal – not because the contracts had high theoretical values, but because proper competitive processes were bypassed to favour politically connected firms. Test and Trace was a procurement disaster – not because of its framework structure, but because billions were spent on systems that didn’t work while alternatives were ignored.
These cases required detailed investigation, understanding of how procurement should work, and careful analysis of what went wrong. They weren’t spotted by people scrolling through contract notices looking for big numbers to get angry about.
The boring truth about governing
Here’s what Reform doesn’t seem to grasp: governing is mostly about doing mundane things well. It’s about understanding how systems actually work before you try to fix them. It’s about recognising that complexity often serves real purposes, even when those purposes aren’t obvious to outsiders.
Yes, government has waste. Yes, some contracts are poorly managed, some frameworks badly designed, some procurement processes genuinely scandalous. But spotting real problems requires understanding how things should work, and it means you need to separate genuine waste from processes that simply look expensive to people who don’t grasp their purpose.
Reform treats governing like an aggressive Dragons’ Den episode – it’s all dramatic gestures and “I’m out!” moments, with far less due diligence. But most government work happens in unglamorous spaces: procurement frameworks, statutory instruments, inter-departmental cooperation, technical consultations. When you assume every framework is corrupt, every technical process is wasteful bureaucracy and every expert opinion shows establishment bias, you’ll break systems you don’t understand while trying to solve problems that don’t exist.
The real red flag
The most troubling part of Reform’s procurement scandal-that-wasn’t, isn’t the misunderstanding itself – it’s how confidently they announced it. No pause to consult experts. No apparent awareness they might be missing something crucial. Just a straight line from “this number looks big” to “racket!” in a single tweet.
This is exactly the mindset that breeds governance disasters. The conviction that common sense and righteous anger can replace expertise and careful analysis. The assumption that if something looks wrong to you, it must be wrong – regardless of whether you actually understand what you’re looking at.
If your flagship “efficiency” unit is just a meme name lifted from Trump, maybe you’re not ready for Number 10. Maybe you’re barely ready for basic number-crunching.
Public procurement might not trend on social media, but if you can’t tell the difference between a supplier list and a blank cheque, you’ve no business near the corridors of power – let alone running 12 councils.
