Chamber and committees

I will direct this question to David Livey, but I am sure that it is applicable to the others, too. You have highlighted that the majority of your members who have bid for public contracts have a negative or a neutral opinion of the process. There seem to be no very positive opinions of it. Will you expand on that a little bit and detail the issues that your members encounter? How can the accessibility of the system be improved?

Are you saying that all contracts are for a year? Surely not.

I do not think that anybody argues that three or five-year contracts would be much more desirable than an annual contract. The difficultly always comes back to the problem of Scottish Government funding, which it gets annually, and it is difficult for the public sector to commit beyond that annual funding. It is a common and acknowledged issue.

You talked about the physical system being quite complex to access. Is that across the board, or are there examples of better practice that could perhaps be held up?

I am talking about the whole process in general. Are there examples that could be held up as being better than others, or is complexity a general issue because of the fundamental procurement system?

Pauline, I will pick up on something else that David Livey mentioned: the lack of consistency. How widespread is that? Is it a case of one sector doing it one way and another sector doing it another way, or does that happen because individual bodies are carrying out the procurement process?

I turn to Martin Rhodes. I am looking at your submission, particularly the report that you produced on the freedom of information questions and so on that you asked various public bodies. I was interested in some of the results. You state that

“public bodies have vastly different ... understandings of Fair Trade”.

That is a pretty sweeping statement. How vast are those differences in understanding and how do they come about?

Thank you.

Which is correct?

That seems to be a simpler approach. What you are describing is organisations going down into the weeds and coming up with other different definitions and so on, which are very difficult to measure against.

Lindsey Millen, do you want to add anything to that?