On 16 March Professor Sue Arrowsmith KC (Hon) presented some of her research on public procurement on the opening day of a three-day International Conference on Public Procurement hosted by the Universidad Externado de Colombia. The event attracted a capacity audience of more than 300 academics, lawyers and purchasing professionals, and will now become an annual event hosted by the University.
Professor Arrowsmith’s paper addressed the different approaches to regulating public procurement seen, on the one hand, in the UK’s Common Law tradition and, on the other hand, in the Civil Law tradition that has influenced Colombia. Her paper identified four key characteristics that distinguish the “classic” version of these two approaches and the policy reasons behind them. It then explored the evolution of the UK’s approach over the last 50 years, including the influence of the Civil Law-based EU system during the UK’s EU membership, and then the impact of Brexit. The paper argued that the post-Brexit approach both retains and even expands to some extent some of the Civil Law influences from the period of EU membership, but at the same time also resorts back to some extent to some of the more traditional pre-EU features of the UK’s approach. Thus it reflects a considered overall balance of the costs and benefits of each approach to suit the UK’s current circumstances and constraints.
She finished by emphasising that there is no “one-size fits all” approach to procurement regulation; thus Colombia, like any other country considering reform of its public procurement regulatory system, needs to address carefully the costs and benefits of various different approaches and how best to deal with them in its own context.
Posted on Friday 24th March 2023