September/October 2011 #2 – Law Journals

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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Limitation: When do we start?

Simon Pedley and Martin Pennington look at limitation following Uniplex ‘The period for bringing proceedings seeking to have an infringement of the public procurement rules established, should only start to run from the date on which the claimant knew of the infringement, rather than from the date of breach.’The changes made to the Public Contracts …

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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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