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Opening remarks by Sarah Cardell, the CMA’s Chief Executive, delivered at the Parliamentary event with the Competition and Markets Authority, Jubilee Room, House of Commons on 8 September 2026.

Introduction

Thank you Martin, and thank you to the Chairs and members of all 3 APPGs for bringing us together today.

It is a pleasure to be here to discuss 2 reports the CMA is publishing today on a topic that is becoming central to UK economic policy: public procurement.

Every year, the UK government spends around £400 billion buying goods, services and infrastructure from the private sector. That is a serious amount of taxpayer money, especially in a world of enormous pressure on households and public finances.

Despite this, until recently public procurement hasn’t generally been a headline-grabbing topic. But these are not just administrative decisions. They are decisions which impact whether and which firms grow. Which technologies succeed. Where investment flows. Where value is achieved or wasted. And where the UK has strategic strengths and dependencies. This is the true meaning of ‘purchasing power’ - and governments all around the world are exercising it in ways we have not seen for decades.

In fact, there is growing recognition that public procurement is one of most powerful levers government has in its industrial strategy toolbox to support a stronger, more dynamic and resilient economy.

Today, we have published 2 reports drawing together the findings from in-depth work and engagement we have undertaken over the last 2 years.

Both reports make recommendations to government which we believe could support the UK’s economic success and sovereignty, as well as deliver better value for taxpayers. The fact that we are discussing them with no less than 4 APPGs today, is, itself, a sign of a strong shared view that we must get this right as a country.

Public procurement

Issues

Let me start with our first report Public Procurement in the National Interest. This work began 2 years ago, as a commitment to advise government on how competition could be leveraged in support of industrial strategy. We expected public procurement to be a feature. In fact, it became the key theme emerging from all our work and engagement.

We started broad, across all the 8 priority sectors, before undertaking more detailed work on the UK’s scale-up challenge, cloud computing, civil engineering and defence. We benefited enormously from regular discussions with members of the CMA’s Growth and Investment Council, whose practical experience helped shape our thinking throughout.

Two years later, we have reached a shared conclusion: public procurement is a powerful strategic capability but, as a country, we are not deploying it as effectively as we could.

Five cross-cutting issues emerged

First, clarity of objectives and the willingness to make trade-offs matters.

Public procurement is expected to deliver a wider range of objectives than ever before: not just value for money, but innovation, growth, resilience, national security, domestic jobs, skills and social value.

Inevitably, that wide range of objectives may require trade-offs and certainly needs clear prioritisation. Minimising cost today may come at the expense of long-term value through greater competition and market dynamism. A preference for established suppliers may reduce perceived delivery risk but make it harder for innovative British firms to secure the customers, investment and credibility needed to scale. In some cases, local employment and training opportunities may be the priority; in others, access to world leading capabilities from global markets may be required. Where government seeks greater strategic autonomy in critical technologies and infrastructure, it may need to accept greater uncertainty and a more active market-shaping role than traditional procurement approaches typically allow today. Our work on cloud brings some of these choices into sharp focus, as does the paper’s discussion on Buying British.

Competition policy can contribute a framework for considering those choices and ensuring policies are designed effectively. From preserving rivalry wherever possible to ensuring support is linked to performance rather than becoming permanent protection. Competition may not always be the overriding objective itself, but it can often be deployed – with a clear understanding of market dynamics –  to enable that ultimate policy objective.

From the CMA’s perspective, the starting point should always be: what is government‘s true priority, what trade-offs are required and how can competition be deployed as a lever to support the end goal?

Second, fragmentation weakens purchasing power.

Across our work, we saw different parts of the public sector buying from the same suppliers and supply chains with limited coordination of demand, expertise or market intelligence.

This was particularly evident in civil engineering, where fragmented accountability, inconsistent procurement approaches and uncertain pipelines can weaken incentives for suppliers to invest in skills, capacity and innovation. Decisions that make sense on an individual basis do not always produce the best outcome for the system as a whole.

More broadly, where government is a major customer, fragmented purchasing can make it harder to shape markets effectively, harder to provide suppliers with confidence about future demand, and harder to learn systematically from experience.

That does not mean centralising every procurement decision. But it does mean being more deliberate about when buyers should act collectively, when expertise should be shared, and when coordination can strengthen local decision-making rather than replace it.

Third, incentives matter.

We repeatedly heard that challenges in public procurement are behavioural and cultural as well as structural. Procurement teams are increasingly expected to support innovation, business dynamism and sovereignty, while at the same time being judged primarily on procedural compliance, risk management and short-term value.

The result can be a system that rewards process more than outcomes.

We saw this particularly in our work on defence. If procurement is expected to support a stronger and more dynamic industrial base, government needs to understand whether its purchasing decisions are actually helping firms to grow, invest and compete. Simply measuring inputs, or counting SME participation, will not tell us whether procurement is delivering the economic outcomes it seeks.

If we want procurement to support growth, innovation and resilience, public authorities need the ability, incentives and data to pursue those objectives with confidence.

Fourth, barriers to entry remain too high.

We were consistently told that public procurement can be too costly, complex and uncertain for innovative firms. A significant public-sector customer can provide a younger firm with revenue, credibility and a route to wider investment. In many cases, it is the difference between remaining a promising start-up and becoming a successful scale-up.

Yet requirements that appear reasonable in isolation can collectively create a system that favours established incumbents with specialist bid teams and long public-sector track records. The result is fewer bidders, weaker competition and fewer opportunities for innovative firms to grow.

The issue here is proportionality. Every major procurement requirement should be assessed not only for the benefit it delivers, but also for the burden it creates and its impact on entry, competition and growth.

And fifth, we are not yet making full use of procurement as a tool for innovation.

Government has enormous purchasing power. Used strategically, it can create demand, support real world testing, accelerate commercialisation and help innovative firms scale.

But procurement processes are generally designed to buy known solutions, manage uncertainty and minimise risk. That does not work in practice for many of the technologies that will matter most to the UK’s future competitiveness and resilience. At the frontier, the technologies which are fast becoming pivotal to economic security and growth, the best solution may not yet exist. The eventual winner may not yet be obvious.

If government wants public procurement to support innovation, it needs to more widely endorse a mindset and approaches that support experimentation, staged development and managed risk. The challenge should not simply be procuring today’s solutions more efficiently but helping to create the markets and technologies of tomorrow.

Recommendations

Based on the evidence and broad engagement we conducted, our paper sets out 5 recommendations, which can be understood as 5 shifts:

First, a shift of focus, from process to outcomes, through stronger system leadership and clearer prioritisation. That includes narrowing priorities to a meaningful number, being explicit about trade-offs, and empowering public authorities to recognise and manage them. Most importantly, it means clearer direction on how and where public procurement should serve wider strategic objectives. The new Office for the Prime Minister and Cabinet should play a key role here.

Second, a shift from fragmentation to coordination. We describe this as informed devolution. That means understanding that different markets across varying localities may require different approaches; while at the same time committing to sharing expertise, coordinating pipelines, pooling market intelligence and learning systematically from procurement outcomes much more than we do today. Wherever purchasing decisions sit, government should have a clearer understanding of how markets operate and how public buyers can work together to gain leverage or realise efficiencies.

Third, a shift from assumption to evidence, through better data collection and infrastructure. Public procurement cannot effectively target outcomes it does not measure. Government needs better visibility of how procurement affects competition, scaling, innovation, resilience and other key policy objectives. If we are to make better decisions in future, we need stronger data not just about who we are procuring from, but the real-world impact of those decisions.

Fourth, a shift from barriers to expansion and opportunity. Every requirement imposed on bidders, including those related to risk appetite, should pass a simple test: does the benefit justify the burden it creates? This is particularly important for British SMEs and scale-ups, who we fervently wish to see succeed. Government should systematically review procurement requirements through a lens of competition, innovation, business dynamism and sovereignty to ensure that processes remain as simple, streamlined and proportionate as possible.

Finally, in a world where rapid technological change is reshaping economic security, resilience and geopolitical power, we need to shift Britain from simply purchasing today’s solutions to helping create the markets and technologies of tomorrow. That means creating a procurement framework fit for frontier innovation: one that recognises many emerging technologies do not fit neatly within traditional approaches and gives procurement teams the confidence to be more experimental and flexible. These approaches should not be reserved for emergencies or exceptional cases. If the UK wants to lead in strategically important technologies, we need to become far more comfortable using public procurement to help innovative firms test, scale and commercialise new capabilities.

The direction of travel in recent years has been positive – from the 2023 Procurement Act to recent changes to the Social Value Model. We believe our recommendations could rapidly accelerate progress toward procurement becoming a more strategic tool of economic policy.

Bid rigging

That, however, depends on one crucial condition: competition must be genuine. So let me turn to our second paper: Rigged Bids, Real Costs.

Bid rigging occurs when suppliers collude during a procurement process. It creates the illusion of competition while covertly undermining it.

The risks are not theoretical. Since 2014, the CMA has completed 7 bid-rigging cases, imposing more than £129 million in fines. More than half involved public procurement. Figures from international authorities show the UK is by no means an outlier.

The wider evidence is concerning. Research cited by the OECD suggests bid rigging can increase procurement prices by 20% or more. Using conservative assumptions of prevalence, the CMA estimates that taxpayers could be overpaying suppliers by between £1 billion and £3.5bn every year. That is desperately needed money, which goes directly from stretched departmental budgets into the pockets of colluding firms.

Nor is the cost purely financial. Evidence also points to reduced quality and innovation, sometimes with very real human consequences. From increases in road traffic accidents due to substandard infrastructure, to increased hospital mortality due to depleted budgets for essential medicines.

Historically, tackling bid rigging has been difficult. Cartels operate in secret and competition authorities have often relied on whistleblowers, complaints and chance discoveries to uncover them. But technology is changing what is possible, with data analytics and AI delivering a step change in our ability to identify suspicious bidding patterns at scale. Around the world, governments and competition authorities (Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Korea, to name a few), are using data screening tools to hunt for suspicious patterns at scale. It is working. But it relies on one critical factor: access to the right data, at scale - including, crucially, losing tender bids.

The CMA’s cartel enforcement and data science teams have developed world-class capabilities in the form of our Bid Rigging Intelligence Tool (BRIT), which is being deployed through pilots with government departments and is already generating promising leads. But BRIT can’t reach its true potential until it has access to the data needed for systematic screening at scale. But this data is not routinely collected or available in machine readable format in the UK. Thus far, there has not been a cross-government commitment to create an accessible, large scale data set - in contrast to many other jurisdictions internationally.  

Our report calls on government to unlock this capability by making the prevention, detection and deterrence of bid rigging an explicit procurement priority in the new National Procurement Policy Statement, and by enabling a more coordinated approach to procurement data across the public sector. These steps would bring the UK into line with leading international counterparts and help unlock savings worth billions of pounds for taxpayers.

Conclusion

Our core message today is a simple one – it is time to recognise the strategic importance of public procurement and consciously deploy it in the national interest. The CMA stands ready to work with government, Parliament and businesses to help realise that opportunity.

Thank you very much.