U.S. Perspectives on the UK “Green Paper” — Post-Brexit Public Procurement Reforms
On March 10, 2021, Chris Yukins submitted comments to the UK Cabinet Office in response to the United Kingdom’s plan for transforming its public procurement laws after Brexit, in the “green paper” entitled Transforming Public Procurement. These comments respond to consultation questions posed by the Cabinet Office, and provide a U.S. perspective on the proposed reforms.
While our UK-based colleagues Sue Arrowsmith, Anne Davies and Ruairi Macdonald, Jane Jenkins, Michael Bowsher QC and Albert Sanchez-Graells, among others, have published very useful comments on the green paper, these comments focus on points of special interest and concern for the U.S. procurement community — and especially on points of potential cooperation between the United States and the United Kingdom. The two nations have cooperated very effectively in related areas of legal regulation, such as corporate compliance; the green paper presents other areas of potential intergovernmental cooperation, which could improve procurement outcomes, open trade opportunities, and enhance anti-corruption efforts in both nations.
Transforming Public Procurement is the Cabinet Office’s plan (or “green paper”) for a new public procurement legal regime in the United Kingdom after Brexit. Lord Agnew, the Minister of State for the Cabinet Office, called this “an historic opportunity to overhaul” the United Kingdom’s “outdated public procurement regime” – a “dividend,” as it were, “from the UK leaving the EU,” to rebuild the procurement system to make it easier for “innovative companies to win business” and to improve public goods and services by making it simpler “to exclude suppliers that have performed poorly in the past.” Id. at 5-6.
The comments deal with specific questions thematically, with reference (as appropriate) to parallel procedures in the U.S. government’s procurement system, and – most importantly – to how the United Kingdom’s proposed reforms may affect ongoing cooperation with the United States as our two nations reaffirm their special relationship.
