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Regional campaigners take the fight to Brussels
Thu 22nd Jan 2009, 10:07am
The campaign to bring 6,000 jobs to the North-East and generate £1.35bn for the regional economy has taken its fight to Brussels.
Buy North-East, run by The Northern Echo and the North- East Chamber of Commerce, has submitted a dossier of information to the European Commission in a bid to cut the red tape surrounding public procurement.
The campaign was launched just over a year ago, after the chamber revealed in the Glover Report that if North- East councils spent one per cent more with local businesses every year until 2016 instead of contracting from outside the region, it would add £1.35bn to the regional economy and create an additional 6,000 jobs.
The chamber has made a submission to the European Commission urging it to tackle the administrative burden that firms face when bidding to win public sector contracts.
The move comes only weeks after Buy North-East was given another boost in the Pre-Budget Report when Chancellor Alistair Darling accepted all the recommendations in the Glover Report as to how best to increase the amount of work going to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Chamber president Richard Bottomley said: “The public sector can play a major role in stimulating the regional economy at this time by recognising the additional value that local companies can bring to councils in their area.
“We must stop forcing smaller firms through unnecessary hoops and look to demystify the whole public sector contracting process. This will open up more opportunities for our excellent regional businesses to work more closely with local authorities.
“The knock-on effect will be enormous, as money spent with North-East companies will circulate our economy rather than being lost to other parts of the UK and abroad.”
The report highlights the frustrations chamber members experience when faced with lengthy pre-qualification questionnaires (PQQs) which can take them between three days and two weeks to complete, without any assurance they will win work.
It calls on the Commission to push through measures to make PQQs more concise and to open up more opportunities.
It also called for more support for SMEs.
Deborah Johnson- Northern Echo