Cabinet Office clears NHS trust over conduct of legal services procurement

The Cabinet Office's ‘Mystery Shopper’ team has accepted that a NHS trust is running a procurement for legal services in support of a competitive dialogue procurement in an impartial manner, after a supplier complained about the process.

The investigation into the procurement being conducted by Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust was revealed in the Mystery Shopper team’s latest summary of its activities.

The supplier had expressed concerns that either the choice of service provider had already been determined in favour of an incumbent or that the procurement was intended purely as a benchmarking exercise in respect of the incumbent’s fees.

The Mystery Shopper team said the trust had responded by indicating that the procurement was being run as a fair and competitive exercise and that there was no preference for any specific outcome.

The trust added that a service provider had been engaged to provide input on the early stages of the project, but it had since become apparent that the scope of the support required went wider than expected. This meant that the broader requirement should be opened to the market.

The Mystery Shopper team said it had “accepted that the procurement was being conducted in an impartial manner, but noted that the incumbent supplier was bound to benefit from their experience of the project. Ideally the complete scope of the requirement would have been competed at the outset.”