Procurement consultants who have done the job.

When consultancy is the right answer, and when it is not

Consultancy is the right answer when the gap is genuinely temporary or genuinely specialist. A team of three carrying an unexpected wave of contract expiries has a capacity gap. A council entering its first major social care recommissioning in a decade has a capability gap. A programme where an internal team is too close to the incumbent has an independence gap. Each of these is well suited to external support with a defined end point.

It is the wrong answer when it is being used to avoid a structural decision. If your procurement function is under resourced every year, consultancy becomes a permanent overhead dressed up as a project. If the real problem is that services do not engage procurement until they have already chosen a supplier, no external firm will fix that, because the cause is internal governance rather than procurement skill.

The honest test before commissioning is to write down what will be different when the work ends, in terms a service director would recognise. If the answer is only that a tender got run, ask whether the money would have gone further on interim capacity or on tooling that makes the next twenty tenders faster.

The main models, and what each is good for

Advisory work is short, senior and narrow: a route to market opinion, a review of an evaluation model, a challenge risk assessment, a market engagement strategy. It is cheap relative to its influence and it is where external experience earns its keep, because the value is in judgement rather than effort.

Delivery work is the opposite: a consultancy runs a procurement or a programme of procurements end to end. It solves a capacity problem quickly but it carries the biggest knowledge transfer risk, because everything learned during the process can walk out of the door at the end unless the contract requires otherwise.

Co delivery sits between the two and is usually the best value for public bodies. The consultancy provides structure, templates, senior challenge and surge effort, while named internal staff hold the decisions and do a defined share of the work. It costs more internal time than full delivery and less money, and it leaves the authority genuinely more capable. Outsourced procurement, where an external team runs the function as an ongoing service, is a fourth model and suits small authorities and housing associations with steady but modest volume.

• Advisory: short, senior, decision focused. Best for route to market, evaluation design and risk review.
• Delivery: consultancy runs the process. Best for genuine capacity crises and one off complex programmes.
• Co delivery: shared work, internal decisions, deliberate skills transfer. Best default for most authorities.
• Outsourced procurement: ongoing managed service. Best where in house volume cannot justify a full team.

Choosing a consultancy: what to actually assess

Assess the people who will do the work, not the firm. Ask for named individuals, their day rate, the proportion of their time committed and what else they are working on. Firms routinely pitch with a senior partner and deliver with a junior consultant, and the difference in outcome is enormous. Put the named team in the contract with a change control clause.

Assess relevant sector experience rather than general procurement experience. A consultant who has run NHS clinical services competitions understands stakeholder dynamics that do not exist in a highways contract. Someone who has worked with housing associations understands the interaction between regulatory expectation, building safety obligations and lender scrutiny. Ask for specifics about comparable work, and press if the answers stay generic.

Assess their position on the Procurement Act 2023 directly. It came into force on 24 February 2025 and it changed procedures, transparency obligations and supplier pool arrangements, including the replacement of the Dynamic Purchasing System with Dynamic Markets. Ask how they have adapted their templates and evaluation approach since. A firm still working to pre Act habits will cost you rework.

Scoping and pricing the engagement

Vague scope is the single biggest cause of consultancy overspend. Define deliverables as artefacts, not activities: a completed evaluation model, a published document pack, a moderation record, a signed contract, a transition plan. Activities like support, facilitation and engagement are impossible to close out and invite drift.

Be explicit about assumptions, because that is where the change requests come from. How many bidders are assumed. How many stakeholder workshops. How many document review cycles. What happens if the timetable slips because of internal approvals rather than consultant delay. Agreeing these upfront makes later conversations about additional fees short and factual.

On pricing, day rate work suits advisory and uncertain scope, fixed price suits well defined deliverables, and outcome linked elements can work where the outcome is genuinely within the consultant's control. Be wary of savings share arrangements in public procurement: savings are notoriously easy to claim against a baseline that nobody agreed in advance, and the argument at the end damages the relationship.

The co delivery model in practice

Co delivery works when the split of work is written down before anyone starts. A workable division puts the consultancy on structure and heavy lifting, specification drafting support, evaluation model design, document assembly, market analysis and challenge, and puts internal staff on decisions, stakeholder relationships, service knowledge and anything that must survive the engagement. Every deliverable has one named owner from each side.

The mechanism that makes it stick is a shadowing sequence. The consultant leads the first instance with the officer alongside, the pair run the second together, and the officer leads the third with the consultant reviewing. By the end of a programme of several procurements, capability has genuinely moved rather than being promised in a closing report. This costs more internal time than delegation, which is exactly why it delivers more.

Documentation discipline matters more here than anywhere else. If the templates, evaluation descriptors, market intelligence and lessons learned live in the authority's own system rather than in the consultant's laptop, they remain assets afterwards. Running the work inside your own procurement platform is the simplest way to guarantee that, and it also means the audit trail is complete without a handover exercise.

Governance, independence and conflicts of interest

Any external party involved in specification, evaluation design or scoring introduces conflict of interest questions that must be handled on the record. Take written declarations at the outset and refresh them when the bidder list is known. If a consultancy also has a commercial relationship with a likely bidder, that is not automatically disqualifying but it must be declared, assessed and documented before the competition, not after a complaint.

Be clear about the consultant's role in evaluation. Advisory involvement in designing criteria is normal. Actually scoring bids on behalf of the authority is a heavier commitment and should be a conscious decision with named individuals, recorded moderation and a clear line of accountability back to the authority's own officers. Decisions remain the authority's regardless of who drafted the paperwork.

Internal audit and scrutiny committees will ask how the consultancy was procured, what it cost, what it produced and what changed as a result. Keeping that evidence in the same system as the procurement itself makes those questions routine rather than a research exercise months later.

Sector realities: councils, NHS, housing, education and charities

Councils bring political oversight and directorate fragmentation. A consultancy that cannot handle a cabinet report or a scrutiny question will struggle regardless of technical strength. Expect to spend real effort on internal engagement, and expect the timetable to be shaped by committee cycles rather than by procurement logic.

NHS organisations layer national frameworks, collaborative arrangements and clinical stakeholder involvement onto every significant competition. Consultancy value here often lies in structuring clinical engagement so that evaluation stays defensible when a large mixed panel is scoring. Housing associations face regulatory expectations, building safety obligations and lender scrutiny, with spend concentrated in repairs, maintenance and development, so contract management capability usually matters more than tendering flair.

Education buyers, from academy trusts to colleges and universities, are typically resource constrained and framework reliant, and often need help choosing between framework routes rather than running full competitions. Charities and third sector bodies handling public money face funder scrutiny with very small teams, where the most useful engagement is often a light touch retained arrangement rather than a project.

Dynamic Markets, frameworks and where advice pays for itself

Route to market choice is the decision with the largest downstream consequences and the one authorities most often get wrong on their own. An open competition, a framework call off, a dynamic market competition and a below threshold quote exercise carry very different effort, timescale, flexibility and challenge risk, and the right answer depends on market maturity, contract duration and how much the requirement is likely to change.

Dynamic Markets deserve particular attention since the Procurement Act 2023 replaced the Dynamic Purchasing System. They are permanently open, membership cannot be capped, applications must be assessed within a reasonable time, and pending applications must be considered before a competition concludes. That creates an ongoing operational commitment, so setting one up is a decision about running costs as much as about compliance. Good advice here saves years of avoidable administration.

The utilities position differs. Utilities in water, energy and transport may charge suppliers membership and award fees and may run member only tenders, while general contracting authorities may not charge membership fees. If your organisation operates across both, the design of your supplier pools needs to reflect that rather than assuming one rule set.

How eSourcing Data works with authorities

eSourcing Data provides consulting and outsourced procurement alongside its source to contract software, which means an engagement can be scoped either as advice, as co delivery, or as an ongoing managed service, with the work carried out inside the authority's own platform rather than in a consultant's private files. The practical effect is that when an engagement ends, the templates, evaluation models, supplier records, contract data and audit trail stay with the authority.

The software side covers sourcing and tendering, supplier onboarding and assurance, evaluation and moderation, contract management, governance and audit, analytics and reporting, and below threshold workflows, with UK data residency and GDPR compliance. Public buyers can access the software through RM1557.15 G-Cloud 15, where 28 software services are listed on the Digital Marketplace alongside cloud support services, bought as call off contracts. A framework listing is a route to market, not an approval or endorsement.

For authorities weighing consultancy against capability building, the more useful conversation is usually about both: enough external support to get through the immediate pipeline, and enough structure left behind that the next cycle needs less help. That is the test worth applying to any procurement consultancy proposal, including this one.