Since 2013 my department, through the OGP has liaised with a sample of public service bodies to gather data on procurement addressable expenditure from across the public service to support the provision of public procurement sourcing services and inform policy development in this area. This data was also used, on an aggregated basis, as the basis for the ‘Spend Data’ component of an annual ‘Public Service Spend and Tendering Analysis’ report. The other component of the report being ‘Tendering Analysis’, used data captured via the national electronic tendering platform, eTenders. The OGP has published seven such Public Service Spend and Tendering Analysis Reports for 2013 – 2019.
Following the introduction of the EU General Data Protection Regulation and associated amendments to national data protection legislation in 2018, and due to the potential for procurement addressable expenditure data to contain personal data, following the completion of the 2019 data report, the OGP ceased the collection of said data from public bodies. This decision was taken on foot of legal advices at that time. Subsequent to this, the OGP were engaged with public sector bodies on a number of other significant events that required their cooperation and resources, in particular the design, implementation and transition to a new national electronic tendering platform.
While my department recognises the importance and benefit of having visibility of procurement addressable spend from across the public service, the OGP has no legal basis or ability to access that data. However, we are exploring options to address the data protection constraints that have arisen, the OGP also sees this as an opportunity to consider reviewing the overall approach and mechanism used to collect and process this type of data.
The process for the collection of procurement addressable expenditure data from a sample of public service bodies was carried out on a voluntary basis by those public bodies and involved the extraction of finance data from a multitude of different financial systems from across the public service. It required the public bodies involved to have inhouse ICT systems and data processing capabilities, the data was generated from a wide range of financial systems, in various formats and quality, and in some cases the process involved significant lead times to facilitate the completion of end-of-year financial accounting procedures before the information could be shared with the OGP. This raised a number of challenges in terms of processing the data and also resulted in a lag between the reporting period of the data and the publication timeline.
Given the new data protection considerations that have arisen, and the general challenges experienced in collecting and making the procurement addressable expenditure data available, the OGP are exploring new approaches to re-activating public procurement reporting that provides an overview of public procurement activity, with a greater focus initially on tendering data which is more readily available and within their control for processing. While a timeline is not currently available on this initiative, the OGP would be happy to advise as soon as a timeline becomes available. This initiative would build on the data the OGP already makes available publicly available such as online access to all tenders published via the eTenders platform and access to contracts awarded via the Government OpenData portal.
