The State of Procurement Report
Rebooting public spending to unlock better outcomes and growth
Partners: Recurve & Bloom Procurement Services
When we launched this project in November, we asked a simple question: if the policy ambition to use public spending as a tool for better outcomes and growth is so clear, why isn't it working?
Last week, the UK Government announced further policy initiatives to encourage new practices in procurement, including new departmental SME spending targets worth £7.4 billion a year by 2028.
Today, Recurve and Bloom publish The State of Procurement 2026: Rebooting public spending to unlock better outcomes and growth. Based on four months of research, a national sector diagnostic, expert roundtables, and interviews with practitioners from Manchester to Cardiff to West London our joint report shows why these targets matter, the scale of what needs to change to deliver them, and the practical steps to get there.
What we found
The UK's procurement system isn't broken. It's running in Safe Mode.
Like a computer that boots with minimal functionality to avoid a crash, public sector procurement has settled into a defensive posture — processing renewals, avoiding legal challenge, defaulting to the largest and most familiar suppliers. The system keeps going. But most of its capability is switched off.
The Reality Check diagnostic confirmed three forces driving this pattern:
Squeezed bandwidth — 64% of procurement teams are consumed by transactional work, with no time to engage markets early or redesign services.
Conflicting priorities — social value ambitions that rarely survive contact with a real budget, with price weightings as high as 80% overriding everything else at point of award.
And risk aversion — in a system where teams are overstretched and legal challenge is an ever-present threat, bundling requirements into single large contracts has become the default.
The SME spend share tells the story plainly. Despite direct spending with smaller firms reaching a record £45.4 billion in 2024, that share has sat at exactly 20% of total procurement for six consecutive years. The government's new targets and wider modernisation announcements are a direct response to that stagnation. Delivering on them will require more than targets alone.
Rebooting the system
The report's solutions section is built around three things that actually move the dial, drawn from pioneering practice already happening across the UK.
Manchester City Council invested in a centralised contract management system that now gives its commercial team an 18-month forward view across £2.7 billion of live contracts. That visibility is what moves a team from reactive to strategic — processing renewals is replaced by pipeline planning, and procurement professionals finally have the headroom to do the job they were hired to do.
NHS Wales and Cardiff Capital Region’s response to a 30,000-person endoscopy backlog shows what the Competitive Flexible Procedure was designed to enable. Rather than specifying a solution, the region defined the outcome it needed and invited the market to respond. The result was a new bedside device, significant private R&D investment, and a pathway to national NHS rollout — generated by a procurement process that made room for genuine innovation instead of closing it down at the point of specification.
And South YorkshireMayoral Combined Authority, which now directs 71% of its spend to SMEs, shows what sustained political commitment produces in practice. That figure doesn't happen by accident. It reflects years of deliberate mandate from the top of the organisation — exactly the kind of visible commitment the government is now asking all departments to match.
None of this required new legislation. The Procurement Act 2023 already provides the tools. What it requires is bandwidth, leadership cover, and contract design that matches ambition to reality.
Unlocking local growth
The government's recent announcements frame SME procurement as a growth and jobs story. The report makes the same case from the ground up. Every pound of public spending that flows to a regional firm stays closer to the community it serves. It pays local wages. It scales a business on real commercial income rather than speculative funding. It builds the track record that makes the next contract — and private investment — easier to win.
Done with intent, at scale, strategic procurement is one of the most direct tools available for building the resilient, home-grown supply chains that the UK's growth requires. The government has named that priority. Our report shows what delivering it actually takes.
Get in touch
If you're a place leader, a commissioner, or a supplier trying to navigate the system and you'd like to talk about what the findings mean for your organisation get in touch.
Read the report now
The full report is published by Bloom and authored by Recurve’s founder, Sam Markey. It is free to download via the link below.
