“Procurement writing for people who actually buy things.”
A peer-reviewed causal study finds that above the audit threshold, procurement officers systematically shifted from competitive auctions to direct contracting. Auctions have twice as many auditable steps as direct contracts. Officers who know they will be audited choose the procedure that generates the fewest findings. That procedure is not an auction.
Infrastructure Australia's 2026 Infrastructure Priority List claims to align the pipeline with market capacity, but the mechanism for alignment is market-forced delay: the workforce shortage fell only because the market pushed projects back, not because the planning function imposed a constraint, and a new 300,000-worker shortage peak arrives in mid-2027.
The NAO's March 2026 report found the government's Shared Services Strategy unlikely to reach its £1 billion savings target because departments aren't joining. The diagnosis is governance failure. The actual problem is that the mechanism for enforcing compulsory participation hands the decision back to individual departments — which is not enforcement at all.
The PAC correctly diagnosed a £900 million data gap in UK consultancy spending — then recommended better reporting requirements on the same bundled contracts that make reclassification the path of least resistance.
Airservices signed a cost-incentive contract at twice the supplier's own fixed-price bid, then expressed surprise seven years later that the incentive model hadn't contained costs.
DfT has a well-designed lessons-learned framework. The Government Internal Audit Agency confirmed in January 2026 that programme teams don't apply it. The NAO's March 2026 prescription for Northern Powerhouse Rail is to monitor whether the lessons are being applied.
Adoption statistics measure the newest tool, not the deepest capability. The functions being graded 'low uptake' have been running AI since before the people writing the reports knew what it was.
The CIPS State of Procurement and Supply 2026 report is titled 'Time to Lead'. The harder measures in the same report — board representation down, strategic skills retreating, 'afterthought' perception up — describe the opposite. This is the COVID-era bifurcation pattern, running on schedule.
The PAC found UK government can't measure its own consultancy spend. The deeper problem is that both sides of the transaction know which door is unguarded — and the buying organisation's own stakeholders are often the ones holding it open.
The Nature for Climate Fund commissioned five years of tree planting and peatland restoration without building outcome measurement into its design. The NAO cannot assess value for money. Defra says it expects very high value for money. Those two positions are not compatible.