Across the UK, Ireland and Europe, procurement has undergone a genuine professional transformation over the past two decades. It has moved, at least in language, from a back-office cost-cutting function to a boardroom-level strategic priority. Standards bodies, industry frameworks, national strategies and EU directives all tell the same story: procurement is now about value. And yet the gap between what the profession says and what it actually does has arguably never been wider.
The Lowest Price Habit in Sustainability
Nowhere is the evolving relationship between policy language and practical implementation more visible than in sustainability. In Ireland, the Office of Government Procurement (OGP) set out its Green Public Procurement Strategy 2024–2027 and, in July 2025, issued Circular 17/2025, which progressively strengthens the role of green criteria across the public sector, moving them towards standard application. In the UK, the Procurement Act 2023, which came into force in February 2025, places greater emphasis on social value and long-term outcomes within public contracts. At EU level, the European Commission is preparing a wider revision of the Public Procurement Directives, expected in 2026, with the intention of embedding sustainability more consistently across what is currently a €2 trillion annual public procurement market.
The ambition is clear, though implementation remains uneven across member states. The International Institute for Sustainable Development noted in 2025 that, despite the existing EU Directive already allowing for the use of green criteria in procurement, fewer than 15% of contracts above EU thresholds are currently classified as “green.” In practice, this suggests that voluntary approaches have not always translated into consistent uptake. As a result, while the language of sustainable procurement has expanded significantly, its application in day-to-day procurement activity has, in many cases, developed more gradually.
In the private sector, progress is also evolving at different speeds. The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), which marks an important shift by introducing supply chain due diligence as a legal requirement rather than a voluntary commitment, has been adjusted following the European Commission’s Omnibus Simplification Package of February 2025, which aimed to streamline certain compliance elements. Originally designed to place stronger obligations on large companies to address supplier ESG risks, the framework has been refined in response to concerns from parts of industry around implementation complexity and administrative burden.
At the same time, evidence suggests a gap between intent and integration. While over 70% of companies report sustainability as a key procurement driver, only around 30% of ESG-related practices within procurement are assessed as being fully embedded into core strategic decision-making, with many still in earlier stages of operational integration. In practice, this often reflects a transition phase rather than a fully settled model. Procurement teams may set out sustainability commitments in strategy documents and include ESG clauses in supplier contracts, while in some cases reverting to more traditional evaluation criteria such as price when tenders are evaluated. This can create a degree of tension between stated priorities and day-to-day decision-making. Suppliers, particularly smaller ones, are increasingly attuned to these signals and adjust their responses accordingly.
SME Access: A Narrow Open Door
Both the UK and Irish governments have made SME access to public procurement a stated policy priority. Ireland’s Programme for Government 2025: Securing Ireland’s Future includes an explicit commitment to reviewing procurement practices with the aim of supporting greater SME participation. In the UK, the Procurement Act 2023 was similarly designed to improve access for smaller businesses, start-ups and social enterprises in public contracting. The policy direction in both jurisdictions is therefore broadly consistent, with a clear emphasis on widening participation.
In practice, however, the experience for SMEs can still vary significantly depending on contract type and sector. Public tender processes may remain resource-intensive for businesses without dedicated bid teams, particularly where requirements are complex or documentation is extensive. Framework agreements, which account for a substantial share of public sector spending in both the UK and Ireland, can also concentrate opportunities among a smaller pool of established suppliers, which may make entry more challenging for new market participants. Even where contracts are divided into lots, factors such as aggregation of requirements, pre-qualification stages and cash-flow considerations can create additional hurdles, which SMEs may need to navigate to compete effectively.
And then there is the payment side: UK Government research published in July 2025 estimated that late payments cost the economy around £11 billion annually and are associated with significant business pressure, including closures among smaller firms. The research also indicated that over 1.5 million businesses, or roughly 28% of UK businesses, are affected in some way. Additional studies covering the period from September 2024 to August 2025 suggest that around 62.6% of invoices issued by SMEs were paid late.
In response, the UK Procurement Act 2023 includes provisions requiring 30-day payment terms on public contracts, and in July 2025 the government announced further measures aimed at strengthening enforcement around late payments. These initiatives represent meaningful steps towards improving payment practices, particularly in relation to smaller suppliers. Taken together, they also highlight the extent to which payment performance remains an area of ongoing focus. In this context, procurement policy reflects both progress and continued effort to better align day-to-day practice with stated ambitions around supplier relationships and inclusion.
‘Strategic Partnership’
The word partner is arguably one of the most widely used terms in modern procurement. Supplier “partners”, strategic “partner” frameworks, collaborative “partnership” models, the language is consistently present across both public and private sector procurement. In principle, it implies a degree of alignment in objectives, shared interest in outcomes, and a more collaborative approach to delivery. In some cases, particularly within long-established and well-developed supplier relationships, this reflects reality. In others, the term is used more as an aspirational description of the relationship.
For buyers, the language of partnership often reflects a desire to signal collaboration and a more mature approach to supplier management. For suppliers, it may be accepted as part of the commercial context in which they operate. Research suggests that 64% of procurement professionals believe their function’s influence is increasing within organisations, often linked to an emphasis on supplier relationship value. At the same time, studies indicate that relatively few procurement KPIs focus in depth on the qualitative aspects of supplier relationships. In practice, performance measurement tends to prioritise areas such as cost savings and contract compliance, which can shape how “partnership” is interpreted and operationalised.
In many cases, relationships between large buyers, such as public bodies or corporates, and smaller regional suppliers are inherently asymmetrical. In such contexts, the extent to which a relationship functions as a partnership often depends on how it is structured in practice, including factors such as communication, payment terms, risk-sharing arrangements and feedback mechanisms. Where these elements are less developed, the term “partnership” may describe an ambition as much as an operational reality, even though both parties continue to engage constructively within the constraints of the commercial relationship.
Value for Money
In public procurement, “value for money” is often the central reference point in decision-making. It is a widely accepted principle and, by its nature, difficult to contest. At the same time, it can sometimes be used to describe a range of considerations that sit alongside price, including budget constraints, political priorities, risk management and organisational habit. In practice, interpretations of value for money can vary, and in some cases may lean more heavily towards cost efficiency than other dimensions of value.
The EU reform agenda explicitly acknowledges some of these tensions. The European Commission’s 2025 roadmap for revising the Public Procurement Directives proposes a greater emphasis on life-cycle costing, resilience factors and sustainability outcomes alongside price. Similarly, Ireland’s Strategic Public Procurement Roadmap, published in early 2025, identifies the continued prominence of lowest-price evaluation models as a structural challenge, and highlights the importance of broadening assessment criteria in certain procurement categories. In more developed approaches, value for money is increasingly understood as a multi-dimensional concept. It can include total cost of ownership, supplier stability, capacity for innovation, social impact and supply chain resilience. These elements are often more complex to quantify than unit price alone, and procurement frameworks continue to evolve in how they capture and compare them. In many cases, evaluation methodologies now reflect a broader set of criteria, even if price remains a significant and highly visible component of final scoring decisions.
What Honest Procurement Actually Looks Like
The direction of travel in procurement, toward sustainability, inclusion, long-term value and genuine supplier collaboration is the right one. The problem is often the gap between the map and the terrain, and the profession’s tendency to report the map as if it were already the territory.
Closing that gap requires three things:
- Measure what you claim to value: If supplier relationships are strategic, measure their health, not just their cost performance. If sustainability is a procurement objective, track outcomes not only policy words. If SME participation matters, publish the data on who actually wins contracts and at what terms.
- Say what you actually mean: When the real decision driver is budget pressure, call it that by what it is. When a negotiation is about extracting a price reduction, name it honestly rather than dressing it as ‘total cost optimisation’. Suppliers can handle commercial directness and what erodes trust is the combination of opaque motives and sophisticated vocabulary.
- Listen to the supply chain: A supplier that consistently accepts unfavourable terms without pushback is not aligned. A market that responds to sustainability requirements with standard compliance rather than innovation is not convinced. These are signals and the profession has sophisticated tools for supplier segmentation and risk analysis.
What often slows progress is not a lack of intent or understanding, but the way incentives, governance structures and operational constraints interact. Aligning language with practice matters, but so does recognising the conditions that shape current behaviour. Procurement has already earned a stronger voice in strategic decision-making, sustaining that position will depend on continuing to close the gap between what is articulated as value and what is consistently delivered in practice, in ways that are both credible and achievable within the system.
Background Reading and Additional Sources:
- Office of Government Procurement (Ireland), Strategic Public Procurement Roadmap (205): gov.ie/en/office-of-government-procurement/publications/strategic-public-procurement-roadmap/
- IISD, Public Money, Public Value: The EU Procurement Directive Review Explained (September 2025): iisd.org/articles/explainer/european-union-public-procurement-directive-review
- UK Government, Late Payments Research: Impact on the UK Economy (July 2025): gov.uk/government/publications/late-payments-research-impact-on-the-uk-economy
- UK Government, ‘Time to Pay Up’: Toughest Crackdown on Late Payments in Over 25 Years (July 2025): gov.uk/government/news/time-to-pay-up
- Small Business Commissioner (UK), Late Payments Research 2025: smallbusinesscommissioner.gov.uk/late-payments-research-2/
- FreeAgent, Late Payments Are ‘a Fundamental Threat’ to Small Businesses (2025): freeagent.com/blog/late-payments-2025/
- CIPS & RS, 2025 Indirect Procurement Report: Tackling the Cost of Business: cips.org/intelligence-hub/global-procurement-supply-report
- CIPS, Global State of Procurement & Supply 2025: cips-download.cips.org/expert-reports/global-state-of-procurement-supply-2025
- EcoVadis & Accenture, Sustainable Procurement Barometer 2024: cips-download.cips.org/expert-reports/sustainable-procurement-statistics-2024
- Bruegel, Mapping the Road Ahead for EU Public Procurement Reform (October 2025): bruegel.org/first-glance/mapping-road-ahead-eu-public-procurement-reform
- Procurement Magazine, How EU ESG Regulations Are Redefining Procurement Dynamics: procurementmag.com/news/how-european-esg-regulations-impact-businesses-in-2025
