Service Overview

Contents

- Covering Note
- What is this Service?
- What are we delivering?
- Vision
- Problem statement and Goal
- What is out of Scope for MVP
- Success Criteria
- Milestones (Dates etc.)

Covering Note

This instruction sets out all of the design history made during production of the of the “Supplier Information” (formally the “Register of Suppliers”) part of the Digital Platform, on which information about public procurement will be shared as the result of a new legislative regime, expected to come into force in October 2024.  It is intended to set out sufficient detail so that the GDS assessment team who may wish to assess the design of this component are able to see the design history showing the changes made and the reasons behind the change e.g. as a result of specific user feedback obtained by the wider team from key stakeholders.

What is This Service

The service is known as the  “Supplier Information” (formally the “Register of Suppliers”) and is part of the Digital Platform, on which information about public procurement will be shared as the result of a new legislative regime, expected to come into force in October 2024.

This Supplier Information component was originally set out in the Green Paper on Transforming Public Procurement (TPP), published in December 2020 as the “register of suppliers”. It has evolved into two parts of the Central Digital Platform of TPP - identifiers and Supplier Information (formerly RoS).

What are We Delivering

The Supplier Information Service (formerly RoS) will be a digital online service that enables Organisations and Individuals (Sole Traders) to enter key information about their supplier entity, so that this information can subsequently be provided to Buyers and E-Senders for use alongside any bid information the supplier separately makes available to Buyers and/or E-Senders in respect to procurement/s.  It is also intended to be a one stop shop for suppliers, providing them with the ability to maintain a record of their supplier details in one central repository thus saving them the effort of having to provide this information from scratch along with any procurement they decide to bid for.

The Service will enable the re-use of supplier information to be controlled by the supplier who after viewing and amending their supplier data, can choose to:

  1. be provided with a unique code that they can share with a Buyer and/or E-Sender. This code would then enable the Buyer and/or E-Sender to access the suppliers information.
  2. Be provided with a download of the suppliers information in electronic form for them to then share with a Buyer and/or E-Sender.

Vision

The new regime will span the whole procurement lifecycle, from the first identification of the potential to buy, to the end of the contract, there are touchpoints for transparency enhancement.

These touchpoints (or “notices”), are set out in legislation and required in certain situations.  They are constructed such that information is shared publicly to allow procurement activity to take place in as transparent a way as is possible, noting always the constraints around commercial sensitivity and security.

These notices will number many tens of thousands in each financial year and hundreds of billions of pounds of spend.  In 2022, there were more than 17,200 award notices published under the existing regimes for above threshold spend.

The award notice is just one notice in a scheme that has 14.  It is likely that the number of notices to be published above threshold will number far in excess of 100,000 in any given year.  When below threshold notices are added, it is very clear that this is a significant amount of data on public procurement.

This data will all be published or held on the central digital platform, of which the Supplier Information component is an integral part.

Problem Statement and Goal

Legislation

The main driver for change is new primary and secondary legislation. The secondary legislation sets out what compliance with the law looks like for contracting authorities.

The regulations are currently being subject to a public consultation, which will run from 17th July to 25th August 2023. There will then follow a period of consolidation and review by the cabinet office and a government response will be issued, followed by a write round. The final stage will be to lay the regulations in the house and subject them to the affirmative parliamentary process. The regulations are subject to change until they are made.

The target for the regulations to be made is March 2024 and the commencement of the regulations and launch of the new procurement regime and digital platform is October 2024.

Policy

A second driver for is policy. There are many requirements relating to the Supplier Information component of the central digital platform that are non-legislative and we intend those to be driven by policy, now or in the future.

Out of Scope

To be completed

Success Criteria

Delivery of the Benefits of Supplier Information

Benefits being tracked across the TPP regime change, for Supplier Information include:

  1. Reducing duplication for suppliers inputting commonly used procurement data.
  2. Supporting greater consistency and linkage across the procurement lifecycle using identifiers.
  3. The creation of policy-driven databases for the additional modules which will replace manual data collection and improve data capture.
  4. Improvements to government digital capability in the procurement lifecycle, ideally using APIs to connect datasets and users.

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