Public Sector Procurement

Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Finance and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:06 pm on 15 December 2021.

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Photo of Rebecca Evans Rebecca Evans Labour 2:06, 15 December 2021

Diolch. I'm really pleased that this is an area that is within the co-operation agreement, exploring how we can keep this value here in Wales. I think it really does build on some good work that was undertaken over the summer, which was a discovery exercise creating a digital road map for e-procurement. It means that we will be looking at much more transparency throughout the supply chain, so that we do understand those issues that Rhys ab Owen has just described in terms of milk being removed from the country to be processed, only to be returned for the children in schools. That's a really good example of the kind of void that I was talking about earlier, but more so in the area of processing capacity. I know this is an area of particular interest for my colleague the Minister for rural affairs, and, of course, she's looked over many years to support the increase of processing capacity here in Wales. But I'll certainly look at what Carmarthenshire council are trying to achieve and what we can learn from that.

Spreading best practice will be really important in the work that we're doing to increase the capacity and the capability of the procurement profession here in Wales. We've invested in supporting people through graduate qualifications and so on, in the hope that they will stay in the Welsh public sector and become procurement professionals who are working in a different way. It's not all about the bottom line anymore, and understanding things is much more about what social value, economic value and cultural value you can get from your spend, rather than just what's the cheapest thing that you can possibly buy. So, I think we are in a really exciting place with procurement, and if we can look at good examples, such as that described in Carmarthenshire, then I'm very, very, keen to do so.