Buy North East Survey

As part of NECC’s  Buy North East campaign  to improve public procurement in the North East, NECC is carrying out a survey of members’ views.

This will help us to judge how effective businesses feel they are supported through public procurement, the barriers to successful tendering and what improvements should be made.  Please click here to complete the survey.  

This follows a similar survey conducted in 2009, which found:

•         Lack of awareness of opportunities is the biggest reason for businesses not bidding for work.
•         79% of respondents find the process fairly or very complex.
•         Simplicity of documents, consistency of approach between different public sector organisations, and quality of feedback are rated the poorest aspects of the process.
•         Simpler documents is the change considered most likely (74%) to encourage more businesses to bid for public sector work, followed by better advertising of opportunities (64%)
•         53% are more likely to look for public sector contracts as a result of the economic downturn.
•         53% believe the support for regional businesses in the procurement process in the North East is fairly or very poor, compared to 10% who rate it fairly or very good.

Through Buy North East, NECC has been working hard to encourage public bodies to address these issues. We would now like to assess whether there have been improvements in the last year, which will help us further in our lobbying efforts on behalf of members.