The Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) might not have been heard about much in construction up until now, but it is shaping up to be a significant driver of contractual relationships between central government spending departments and their suppliers, not only in the UK but across much of the world. It is to be trialled in the UK on HS2, it was announced at the recent London anti-corruption summit.
Behind the standard is a recognition that more open relationships between governments and their suppliers will lead to greater efficiency and less opportunity for corruption. The scale of corruption in some parts of the world is of a legendary scale and even those jurisdictions that might be regarded as the least corrupt have regular scandals arising, including the UK.
The OCDS has been developed by the Washington based Open Contracting Partnership (OCP) over the past four years or so. The group was spun out of the World Bank and is funded mostly by grants from a range of organisations like the Omidyar Network, a ‘philanthropic investment firm’ founded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. The standard was first published in 2014 and the OCP says it will review and update its principles during 2016–17.
The HS2 trial makes the UK the first of the major industrial economies to commit to the use of the OCDS for contracts administered by its central purchasing authority. The OCDS will involve disclosure of all data and documents relating to the contract at all stages of the contracting process, using a common data model. The UK government said that its commitment was intended to ‘shift the global default from closed to open public contracting’. This would in time reduce fraud and corruption and create more business opportunities for small and medium-sized businesses, as well as improving ‘citizen engagement and innovation’.
A much quoted Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study suggests that 60% of bribes are related to government contracts. But is all this overkill for the UK, don’t we have all the checks, laws and investigatory authorities that we need already in place? The UK is perhaps not as squeakily clean of corrupt practices as some of its citizens believe. It was not all that long ago that the government’s Property Services Agency was regularly slated in reports from the Public Accounts Committee and the Comptroller General for the scale of corrupt practices found in dealings between its civil servants and construction companies. Prosecutions for corruption involving the industry and public servants still reach the courts regularly.
The OCP sees the new commitment made by the UK and other countries as representing ‘a major change in the rhetoric and practice around government contracts’ and signalling a ‘leap forward to shareable open data’.
Ahead probably lie some long struggles to determine exactly what detail of contract award processes and of contracts themselves is to be made available for public scrutiny and at what stage in the contracting process. Fully open public contracting is some way off, even in the UK, but it looks like the way the world of public sector contracting is moving. CL
Nick Barrett
Editor