Government Digital Marketplace looking for providers of digital services

The government has launched an open tender for providers of digital services on its Digital Marketplace to allow the expertise of the companies to be bought online by the public sector.

Freelance digital roles that will be filled through the marketplace include web designers, developers and security experts.

Applications will be open until 19 January with potential suppliers notified a month later.

Successful enterprises and contractors will be listed on a Digital Outcomes and Specialists procurement framework, so public sector buyers will be able to enter into contracts with them without having to go through another tendering process.

The creation of the Digital Outcomes and Specialists framework follows the success of the G-Cloud? framework for IT procurement which has increased the proportion of small firms providing cloud technology services to the public sector. Some 95 per cent of the 709 new suppliers on G-Cloud 7 were SMEs.

It is the latest in a string of moves designed to open up public procurement to small firms. In February, pre-qualification questionnaires (PQQs) were scrapped as a tendering requirement for low-value contracts after Lord Young’s report on small firms in the UK declared them impenetrable? for SMEs.

pQQs have been found to be onerous by small businesses, often imposing more than 40 pages of questions before they can be considered for bidding for a contract, he said.