Today, I would like to discuss the difficulty that smaller firms have in being able to put themselves forward in the tendering process particularly for Government projects. I am going to use a recent example of a tender for a €60,000 contract. Some of the criteria are as follows. First, confirmation of tax compliance, which is fair enough. We all should be tax compliant. Second, confirmation that the tendering party's turnover exceeded over €200,000 for the last three years. That would probably cut a lot of us out of being able to do anything. Third, confirmation that the following insurances are in place: employer's liability of €13 million and public liability €6.5 million. Plenty of small businesses could not afford that type of insurance and definitely did not have a turnover of €200,000. They are probably dying to grow their business by being able to get one of these tenders.

Here are some comments on a recent post I saw online from businesses regarding this type of criteria. One wrote:

We had this exact problem during the summer. Put the effort to win a particularly good and large tender and then were forced to accept terms and conditions that were written for a very large business and not a small growing [company] ...

Another business wrote:

The EL and PL insurance requirements eliminate SMEs and micro-enterprises. Those values are boilerplate requirements and, I suspect, are copied and pasted from tender to tender without question ...

Another business wrote:

Been there, done the tenders, and effectively given up. Public procurement in Ireland - and same in the UK.

Another business wrote:

Same experience here in the past. Expected turnovers of 250k for example. Expected level of insurance too high. We wouldn’t be looking for new tenders if [we were turning over more than] 250k ...

You have to think to that the expertise in smaller, growing firms can sometimes be better than the bigger ones. Larger firms have extra costs in managers, project managers and advisers whereas small firms do not and they can be very competitive. SMEs are having to collaborate together to apply for a tender. How is that fair? This is only the tip of the iceberg based on the small amount of research I have done. I imagine that, if I delved deeper into this, I would find a massive can of worms ready to explode for small businesses. I would welcome a debate on procurement processes for SMEs and how we can how we can encourage acceptance of smaller businesses into tenders.