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Contract: Secret agents

Tom Collins looks at the impact of the Commercial Agents (Council Directive) Regulations 1993 ‘Fundamentally, it has to be shown that it is in the commercial interests of the principal to have an agent who will expend his own time, money and skill to develop the market.’The Commercial Agents (Council Directive) Regulations 1993 (the Regulations) …
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IT: In the system

Luisa D’Alessandro suggests five essential tips for IT procurement ‘While it is unlikely that an organisation will be able to foresee all future requirements, spending at least some time at the start of a project thinking about how requirements might change in the short to medium term may well result in a better contractual position.’Being …
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Procurement Regulations: Costa lot

Julie Prior and Deborah Ramshaw investigate the application of the procurement regulations to development agreements: Commission v Spain ‘The developer is financially responsible for the execution of the works and is liable to carry out the necessary administrative procedures in order to guarantee that the project is free of charge for the authority and that …
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Outsourcing: In a cold climate

Melanie Collier and Matthew Bennett contemplate the use of the negotiated procedure ‘Rather than focusing on legislative changes, UK public authorities should instead re-evaluate their interpretation and use of the existing Regulations in order to get the most out of the regulatory regime.’ While the state of the economy may have dominated much of David …
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Procurement: Taking the high road

In the first of a regular feature, Jack Hayward takes a sideways look at the highs and lows of procurement practice ‘Until we see the draft regulations we can only speculate as to how the government proposes to reconcile the desire to promote local interest with the Public Procurement Regulations 2006.’In the late 1990s I …
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Mutuals: Power to the people

Richard Auton assesses the potential impact of staff mutuals ‘Assuming that the public service mutual will want to be paid by the public body for delivering the service, the arrangement is likely to be a “contract… for consideration… under which a contracting authority engages a person to provide services”. In other words it would be …
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Contracting: The cost of competition

Peter Elliott reviews call-off contracts in framework agreements ‘Where simply applying the terms laid down in the framework agreement, it should be clear from the framework how one establishes who to award to.’The public sector in the UK makes very extensive use of framework agreements. All the signs are that this trend will continue and …
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Procedure: Procurement: the essentials

Rhiannon Holtham gives an overview of the 2006 Regulations ‘Any organisation embarking on a procurement process that is subject to the Public Contracts Regulations 2006 must comply with the principles of the EC Treaty.’This article provides an introduction to the Public Contracts Regulations 2006 (the Regulations) and summarises the four main procurement procedures that a …
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Employment: Hands for hire

Anna McCaffrey and Neil Maclean examine the relationship between TUPE and outsourcing ‘TUPE now expressly covers outsourcing arrangements and goes beyond what was required to implement the revised Directive 2001/23 EC. Thus, unusually, the protections enjoyed by employees in the UK are more extensive than those enjoyed by employees in most of the rest of …
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IT: Cloud busting

Steve Thomas and Hazel Grant consider recent developments in cloud computing ‘The key to ensuring that service levels for cloud services are appropriate to a customer’s business is in choosing the correct service; after all, if the standard service levels are appropriate, there is no need to negotiate them.’With the continued rise of cloud computing …
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