Public contracts should deliver useful services while preserving the knowledge, resources and authority needed to decide what comes next.
My illustration entitled: “The Golden Key and the Locked Machine” – officials receive a ceremonial golden key to an impressive machine, while its inner workings remain locked behind the supplier’s gate. Nearby, residents examine an accessible alternative. Possession alone does not secure practical control.
What does the public receive beyond delivery?
A government can buy a functioning service while losing the practical ability to understand it. The contract may deliver appointments, payments or infrastructure maintenance on time. Yet officials may become unable to assess its operating assumptions, citizens may struggle to question its priorities, and a different policy may appear impossible without rebuilding everything.
I would therefore ask procurement to answer a further question: does the purchase preserve the public’s capacity to decide what should come next? Outsourcing delivery can be sensible. Surrendering the knowledge and authority needed to evaluate the service creates a different relationship.
Reauthorism proposes that essential economic arrangements sustain independently governed knowledge, resources and practical capacity through which affected publics can reconsider institutional purposes and structures. Success does not remove that obligation. By essential arrangements, I mean systems governing necessities or basic economic participation where dependence is substantial and realistic alternatives are limited.
This does not require treating every purchase as a constitutional settlement. The safeguards should reflect the service’s importance, duration, sensitivity and difficulty of replacement. Their purpose is to make public judgment usable where dependence could otherwise turn a purchasing decision into a lasting surrender of choice.
Established procurement practices, a proposed organising principle
The relevant practices already have a history. The OECD’s 2015 Recommendation on Public Procurement addresses workforce capability, evaluation, transparency and stakeholder participation. It also recognises the importance of proportionate tender requirements. Public procurement was already understood as a matter of institutional competence and public purposes, rather than price alone. [1]
The UK National Audit Office’s November 2016 guidance emphasises the importance of being an intelligent client: understanding requirements, costs and the evidence needed to challenge suppliers. The problem of retaining public commercial competence is therefore well established. [2]
Reauthorism’s proposed contribution is an organising principle connecting these practices. A contract should help preserve continuing public authority over what an essential service is for, including while the supplier performs well. Supplier competition can support that authority, but a new contractor implementing an unchanged policy does not necessarily expand it.
Hypothetical contract: a municipal housing-repairs platform
Imagine a municipality buying a digital platform for reporting repairs in publicly managed housing. The system receives requests, assigns priorities, schedules contractors and records completion. This is a hypothetical procurement, not an account of an actual council or supplier.
Suppose the platform performs its specified tasks efficiently. However, the municipality cannot independently examine the rules assigning urgency, export meaningful case histories or compare automated prioritisation with a service led by housing officers. Residents can complain about individual repairs but have no effective route to question the service’s organising assumptions.
Switching suppliers might reproduce the same problem. If the new contract preserves the same priorities and requires the same automation, the public has changed its delivery agent while leaving the policy intact. Reconsidering purpose could instead mean prioritising recurring hazards, improving preventive maintenance or deciding that certain judgments require a person rather than an automated score.
That decision belongs within legitimate public governance, informed by tenants, workers, technical evidence and the municipality’s obligations. Procurement should preserve the means to investigate and implement such a decision. A supplier need not agree politically with every proposed change, but its commercial position should not become the sole practical boundary of public policy.
Keep an informed public institution on the buying side
The municipality needs enough retained expertise to understand the service, formulate questions and assess answers. That includes housing knowledge, digital competence, commercial judgment and the ability to recognise privacy and security risks. External advisers can assist, but the buyer must remain capable of choosing and challenging those advisers.
Usable documentation should explain workflows, data definitions, configurable rules, interfaces, dependencies and error-handling procedures. Staff should be able to apply it to realistic cases. A large archive of diagrams is weak protection if nobody outside the supplier can determine why an urgent repair was placed behind a routine request.
Data portability should preserve meaning as well as files. Case histories may need timestamps, status definitions, links between repeated requests and records of decisions. Export should be tested through a realistic handover exercise. Permissions must support authorised use and migration without assuming that government may reuse residents’ personal information without limits.
Interoperability should likewise be proportionate. The contract could require documented interfaces and suitable standards where they support identifiable future needs. The UK’s March 2015 procurement note on open standards addressed software interoperability and data and document formats. That historical guidance supports attention to compatibility; it does not establish a universal rule for every municipality. [3]
Connecting everything to everything is neither necessary nor always safe. The relevant question is which connections preserve useful options without creating disproportionate cost or exposure. Public capability requires understanding the architecture, including where separation is desirable.
Three illustrative procurement provisions
The following are ordinary-language policy examples. They indicate objectives for procurement design and professional drafting, rather than complete contractual clauses.
Policy example 1 — Keep the service understandable: The supplier will maintain usable documentation of service rules, workflows and dependencies, and help designated public staff demonstrate that they can interpret it. Updates and training will be included in the agreed delivery plan and price.
Policy example 2 — Keep necessary records portable: The municipality and its authorised successor will be able to retrieve agreed service records in documented, usable formats. The parties will test the export and explain missing fields, subject to privacy, security and agreed third-party rights.
Policy example 3 — Make scrutiny and transition workable: Independently appointed reviewers will receive the evidence needed to evaluate service outcomes and operating rules. An agreed transition plan will specify cooperation, necessary licences, continuity responsibilities and assistance at stated prices, including support for an authorised change in delivery method.
These provisions need precise scope, testing arrangements, remedies and fair allocation of costs. Their value would depend on implementation. A requirement appearing in a tender is not evidence that the public has acquired the capability it describes.
My illustration “The Golden Key and the Locked Machine” work-in-progress. The art represents that ownership becomes meaningful control only when people have the knowledge, access and tools to understand, maintain and reshape what they possess.
Independent evaluation must reach the service’s purposes
Audit rights should allow qualified reviewers to examine relevant evidence, including whether reported performance conceals repeated problems. For the housing platform, closing requests quickly may differ from resolving hazards. Evaluation should be able to question the chosen measures, not only verify that the supplier has calculated them correctly.
The municipality should provide protected resources for independent evaluation and accessible participation. Tenants may need translation, assistance or time to contribute. Maintenance workers may understand operational failures absent from dashboards. Appointments, budgets and conflicts should be disclosed, and reviewers themselves should remain open to scrutiny.
Public authorship also requires a connection to authoritative decisions. Representatives should be able to place justified proposals before accountable public bodies and receive reasons for acceptance or rejection. Consultation alone does not confer decision-making power, and neither expertise nor participation gives every individual an unlimited veto.
Suppose residents and evidence support ending automated prioritisation for complex cases. The municipality would need to assess staffing, costs, accessibility and continuity. It might choose a mixed process or retain automation after examination. The public’s authority is demonstrated by a usable opportunity to decide otherwise, rather than by a requirement to reject technology.
Respect suppliers’ knowledge, security and incentives
Trade secrets and intellectual property deserve serious treatment. A supplier may bring reusable software and techniques developed for many customers. Public authorship need not require acquiring ownership of that entire business. The parties should distinguish pre-existing technology, commissioned work, service records and the permissions necessary for evaluation and lawful future delivery.
Licensing should specify which materials the municipality and authorised successors may use after expiry, for what purposes and at what cost. Temporary continued access may be necessary to complete a safe handover. Source-code escrow could be considered for defined risks, but it would not substitute for documentation, workable permissions or people able to use the material.
Open-source software may help, but access to code does not automatically supply expertise, documentation or practical authority. Proprietary software may support public choice through appropriate licences, interfaces and cooperation. The arrangement should be judged by usable capabilities and costs, rather than a presumption that one licensing model always succeeds.
Cybersecurity can also justify controlled access. Independent review need not entail publishing vulnerabilities, credentials or personal records. Confidential inspection, secure testing environments and public summaries can sometimes reconcile scrutiny with protection. Restrictions should be specific enough to assess, rather than making security an unanswerable reason to withhold every explanation.
Suppliers need predictable commitments and fair payment. A public body should not demand unlimited unpaid redesign, transfer risks the supplier cannot manage or change the scope opportunistically. Requirements for future adaptation should be explicit and priced, with lawful processes for variations, renewal or replacement.
Pay for capability without excluding smaller suppliers
Documentation, portability and review cost money. So do retained public staff, testing and transition assistance. Procurement should compare whole-life costs, including the cost of dependence, without assuming that every additional safeguard creates value. Independent evaluation should examine whether a requirement is actually used.
Small suppliers may be disproportionately burdened by complex procedures and demanding capacity requirements. The OECD’s 2018 study of SMEs in public procurement identifies these barriers. Safeguards intended to prevent dependence should not inadvertently reserve public contracts for firms large enough to maintain elaborate bidding departments. [4]
Proportionate templates, reusable documentation, staged evidence requirements and shared testing arrangements could reduce duplication. The municipality could require stronger controls for sensitive functions while simplifying lower-risk components. Standards should describe an achievable result and allow suppliers to demonstrate equivalent approaches where appropriate.
Transition should be planned from the beginning. The June 2020 UK Outsourcing Playbook addresses contract-end preparation, information transfer and coordinated exit and mobilisation. These are established continuity practices. My Reauthorist interpretation extends their purpose to preserving feasible policy choices, including a different balance between automated and human delivery. [5]
A contract that leaves tomorrow open
The municipality should buy more than a mechanism for delivering today’s specification. Where the arrangement is essential, it should preserve the public knowledge, independent resources and practical options needed to examine tomorrow’s specification too.
I do not present these contracting techniques as new inventions. The proposed Reauthorist principle is that successful provision should sustain continuing public authorship. A capable supplier can remain a valued partner for many years while citizens retain a meaningful role in deciding what the service should do, how it should operate and whether automation remains appropriate.
Sources
- OECD, Recommendation of the Council on Public Procurement, OECD/LEGAL/0411. 2015. Especially provisions on access, participation, capacity and evaluation.
- National Audit Office, Commercial and Contract Management: Insights and Emerging Best Practice. November 2016. Especially Insight 7 on being an intelligent client.
- Cabinet Office and Crown Commercial Service, Procurement Policy Note 07/15: Open Standards When Specifying Technology Requirements. 27 March 2015. Cited as a historical policy document.
- OECD, SMEs in Public Procurement: Practices and Strategies for Shared Benefits. 26 October 2018. On barriers to SME participation and proportionate procurement practices.
- Cabinet Office and Government Commercial Function, The Outsourcing Playbook, Version 2.0. June 2020. Especially the guidance on delivery models and preparing for contract end and transition.