Nov 14 / Joanne Toon

New Zealand Government Procurement Rules changes - Award Notices

The New Zealand Government Procurement Rules are changing. The fifth edition goes live on the 1st December. While a lot of the changes are cosmetic – making the language less bureaucratic, merging rules where they were repetitious, or moving information that was in the rules into guidance, there are a few points which suppliers need to be aware of.

In this series of articles, I want to highlight some of the more significant changes for suppliers, and outline any actions which you should be doing to get ready.

This is the final article, and here I’m highlighting a few Rules which contain updates to the requirements to publish the outcome of procurement processes.

Primary requirement

1. Agencies must publish a contract award notice on GETS within 30 business days of all parties signing the contract/s.

Application

2. The contract award notice must include:
a. the agency’s name and address
b. the successful supplier’s or suppliers’ name/s and address/s
c. a description of the goods, services or works
d. the date the contract/s was awarded
e. the term of the contract/s
f. the expected spend under the contract/s, or the highest and lowest offers the agency evaluated to award the contract
g. the type of procurement process used
h. if the agency claimed an opt-out (Rule 11) or exemption from open advertising (Rule 12), the circumstances that justify the opt-out or exemption
i. a New Zealand Business Number (NZBN) where available
j. any other information, as requested by the Procurement System Leader, for example information on what economic benefits to New Zealand have been built into the procurement.

3. The Procurement System Leader may publish a report identifying contracts notified on GETS for which a contract award notice has not been published.

9. Agencies must either:
a. publish a contract award notice for secondary procurements when the value is $100,000 or greater, or
b. report panel spend annually to the Procurement System Leader (Rule 45), where they have not published a contract award notice under point 9a, setting out:
i. estimated total spend
ii. actual total spend
iii. number of contracts awarded to each supplier on the panel
iv. value of contracts awarded to each supplier on the panel.

4. When a procurement has been cancelled, agencies must promptly publish a cancellation notice on GETS that sets out the reasons why the procurement has been cancelled.

There has always been a requirement to be transparent about who has won government contracts for values over $100,000, but there had been exceptions for contracts awarded under the Opt-out rule, and for those awarded under secondary procurement processes.

The updates to Rule 32 and the inclusion of 22.9 have removed these exceptions, meaning every contract over $100,000 should have an accompanying award notice, no matter how the contract was awarded.

Similarly, if a contract opportunity which has been openly advertised is then cancelled, for any reason, the agency must let everyone know why.

These changes are aimed at increasing transparency of where public money is going, or, letting organisations know why a contract hasn’t been awarded – a courtesy given how much time and effort is spent on responding to opportunities.

You should start seeing more information appearing in award notices, particularly for those which haven’t been openly advertised for any reason.

This is useful market research – by looking through award notices, you can get an understanding who is winning contracts, getting a rough idea of the pricing, and the type of Economic Benefits that agencies are looking for.

However, realistically, the Economic Benefit information won’t be available until later next year. Agencies are only going to need to start asking for these details after the 1st December, meaning the information won’t start appearing in award notices before those processes have finished. Even for less complex processes, it is unlikely we’ll get the Economic Benefits in the award notices before March / April next year.

Keep an eye on GETS for award notices in the notice categories you are interested in, and build this into your market research data.

If the contract has been awarded through a GETS notice, then the Award forms part of the overall notice. It is worth noting that you will only get an automatic notification if you have submitted a response. If you are curious about the contract, but chose not to bid, then you will need to check back – GETS won’t alert you even if you are still subscribed to the opportunity.

If the contract was awarded through a panel contract, an exemption or an opt-out, (i.e. there wasn’t an original GETS notice advertising the opportunity) then this should come appear as an Award Notice (AN).

As with a number of these Rules, I will be interested to see how they are applied in practice. Realistically, a large proportion of the All of Government secondary processes are for less than $100,000, which means we’ll only get to see any data when it is released (probably in aggregate) by NZGP.

Whether in individual award notices, or in aggregate, this is still going to be more information than we currently get about how much work is going through the All of Government panels. It will be very interesting to see how many contracts are being awarded, and the range of organisations who are winning business through AoG secondary processes. This will also give vital information for when it comes to the next time each main AoG contract is opened up for new suppliers to join.

I’m very pleased to see the Rule about providing reasons why a process has been cancelled – I hope that GETS will be updated to require agencies to provide these details. There are often very valid reasons why a process does not end up with a contract award, but they aren’t always provided when the notice is cancelled or ends with No Award. Given the time and effort suppliers go to in order to bid for the work, it is only courteous to spend a minute to explain why the opportunity will not end up in a contract.

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New Zealand Government Procurement Rules changes - Award Notices

Rule 32: Contract award notice

Plus Rule 22.9, from Panel of Suppliers

Plus Rule 29.4, from Awarding the Contract

Why this change?

What does this mean for me?

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