by Ross Clark - Wednesday, 5th September 2007 -

The video that helped the London team to win its bid to hold the Olympic Games in 2012 featured a wide-eyed girl leaping over a sofa – and then fast forwarded to her realising her dream of winning a gold in the gymnastics hall.

But if I catch my kids leaping over the sofa I will tell them not to be silly.
 
Gymnastics is a mug’s game. They should think instead of the careers available in public procurement. 

Why risk life and limb on the parallel bars when, with no effort at all, you could join the army of jobsworths who have managed to push up the estimated cost of the 2012 Olympics to more than £9bn?

There is no commercial acumen required of those employed to administer the increasingly complex world of public sector contracts. Nor is there any need to have much common sense.

The Small Business Service recently reported on a computer company that was told it was “too small” to take on a public contract.  Rather peeved, it approached a larger competitor and asked it to bid on its behalf.

The large company duly won –and then subcontracted the job to the small firm, which completed the work as required.

All worked out well, then –except, that is, for the taxpayer. The quote the large company charged for the work was three times what the smaller company had submitted.

In many cases it isn’t necessary for government departments to exclude businesses they consider to be too small to compete: the sheer weight of paperwork required of those bidding for public sector contracts puts them off.

One company reported that it was asked to submit 60 pages of forms merely to express an interest in a contract with a London borough.

To be fair, the government has at least acknowledged that small businesses are disadvantaged when it comes to tendering for public sector work.

Quangos have been asked to prepare proposals for how they intend to make their tendering processes easier.

But still one wonders how much they mean it. And, of course, the final word is not with the government anyway – it is bound by several EU directives on public procurement that, despite being designed to open up the tendering process, have hugely complicated it.

As with all public sector activities, procurement is afflicted by empire building and power games. Just look at the bizarre business of where to site the country’s first super-casino.

Last month the Casino Advisory Panel recommended that Manchester be chosen, provoking Blackpool’s bid team to threaten a legal challenge. The process will now drag on for many months.

Why do we need a Casino Advisory Panel at all? Either super-casinos are a danger to the public, in which case none of them should be allowed, or they are a harmless bit of fun, in which case the market should be allowed to decide how many of them the country needs and where they should be sited.

At the first sign of anti-competitive behaviour in the board game world, the Competition Commission came down heavy, fining – without any apparent sense of irony – the makers of Monopoly.

But with its one supercasino, the government is creating an unnecessary monopoly – complete with an army of bureaucrats to decide where it will go.

What fun it must be for Tessa Jowell to pose as a croupier and sit in judgment over the rival bids.

No one should have any delusions over what public procurement is really about: not procuring work for small businesses or value for the taxpayer, but procuring work and self-importance for the bureaucrats.