Presentation: State of procurement report – is your city leaving its most powerful resilience tool on the table?

Cities today face an uncomfortable convergence. Geopolitical instability is fracturing supply chains. The peace dividend is gone. Public trust has collapsed into what one major index calls hyper-insularity – communities retreating inward, viewing external institutions with suspicion. Meanwhile public services are under sustained pressure, delivery models are largely last-century, and only 14% of Britons expect the next generation to be better off.

The resilience agenda has never been more urgent. Or more complex.

Most responses reach for new capital, new technology, new governance structures. But cities already control spending worth £434 billion a year – a mechanism capable of building local supply chain depth, seeding domestic capabilities, anchoring community wealth and strengthening the social fabric. Most are barely using it.

New research from Recurve and Bloom reveals why. The UK’s public procurement system is running in Safe Mode: a defensive posture that protects against procedural failure while systematically undermining the adaptive, place-based delivery that genuine resilience demands.

This session makes the case for a reboot.

Key talking points:

• Findings from the State of Procurement 2026 expose three forces throttling strategic intent: bandwidth paralysis that leaves no time for market shaping; budget pressures that reduce social value and local supply chain ambitions to a paper tiger; and risk aversion that concentrates contracts in large primes — creating exactly the single points of failure that a resilience agenda exists to prevent.
• Case studies will show what breaking the pattern looks like. Manchester City Council’s pipeline visibility system transformed reactive crisis management into strategic foresight. Cardiff Capital Region’s outcome-based endoscopy challenge used procurement to catalyse private R&D investment and address a critical delivery challenge — a model for how cities can pull innovation toward their most pressing challenges.
• The regulatory permission already exists. The missing ingredient is leadership — embedding strategic procurement into Growth Plans as a resilience mechanism, not a compliance footnote; directing spend toward locally-embedded suppliers who strengthen economic and social fabric over the long term; and providing the air cover that procurement teams need to choose outcomes over process.