Procurement Policies

Part of 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Finance, Constitution and Cabinet Office – in the Senedd at 2:05 pm on 15 May 2024.

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Photo of Rebecca Evans Rebecca Evans Labour 2:05, 15 May 2024

I'm very grateful for the question, and it leads me to think of some work that we've been doing through the co-operation agreement with Plaid Cymru in relation to better understanding Welsh spend in terms of procurement. So, we've been looking at how we can map out spend more accurately in Wales, and there are lots of questions, even fundamentally, that we have to answer. So, how do you go about defining a Welsh company? Is it a company that has a business here in Wales, or a postcode here in Wales? Some businesses that contribute an awful lot to the Welsh economy aren’t Welsh businesses, if you like. So, what credence do we give to the number of Welsh employees? That kind of thing. So, we've been looking very closely at how we go about defining that work, and we hope to say a bit more about that in due course.

But then we're also considering how we can establish a kind of ‘made in Wales’ mark that businesses can use themselves to identify themselves, looking at the ‘made in Ireland’ mark that has been given to businesses over there. That does help businesses, as we understand it, to be able to market themselves in Ireland as Irish products. We're looking to see what more we can be doing here.

We do have a great deal of public policy advice notices that are provided to the public sector to enable them to better support businesses that are here in Wales, and also to deliver on some of our other priorities, such as supporting small and medium-sized enterprises in particular. So, there are a number of things going on in procurement at the moment, not least our new procurement legislation.

Following the exit from the European Union, we have had to look fundamentally at the way in which we procure, so we're able, through that legislation, to put a greater focus on procurement in that kind of local context. Equally, we have the work that we've been doing with the UK Government on this as well, and our own social services—. I always say social services, but it is our our social partnership Bill, which again seeks to drive those public goods, if you like, from our procurement.

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