THE ALLIANCE FOR PURPOSEFUL PROCUREMENT

Britain spends £434 billion a year on procurement. Too little of it is spent on purpose.

The Alliance for Purposeful Procurement is the coalition turning that spend into strategic resilience, SME growth and sovereign capability.

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£434bn

spent by the UK public sector on goods and services every year — the state's most powerful, most neglected lever.

Source: House of Commons Library

64%

of procurement teams are consumed by transactional work, leaving the system stuck in "safe mode".

Source: The State of Procurement 2026

35%

of public contracts let by UK local government are awarded to SMEs, and rising annually - 3x central government spend with SMEs.

Source: Tussell

WHY PURPOSEFUL PROCUREMENT

A new term for a new political era.

The Procurement Act 2023 and the National Procurement Policy Statement set clear expectations on public buyers. The political appetite for a more deliberate approach to public spending has never been higher. And yet the gap between stated ambition and actual practice is visible to anyone paying attention.

Part of the problem is framing. Social value has been diminished and commodified — reduced to a compliance exercise that underdelivers on impact and often locks out the very suppliers it was meant to enable. It now feels like a bureaucratic burden rather than an opportunity.

Purposeful procurement gets back to the heart of it: how can we best use our resources to deliver our priority outcomes? Economic resilience, digital sovereignty, local supply chains, health outcomes, community wellbeing. The Alliance raises ambition on what is possible — and equips decision-makers with the tools to act.

It starts with the State of Procurement Report

THE EVIDENCE BASE

A diagnosis is where most reports stop. The Alliance is what happens next: it turns each finding into a line of work. Three threads run through everything it does:

THE REPORT FOUND

Procurement teams consumed by transactional work, with little bandwidth left for strategy.

SO THE ALLIANCE WORKS ON

Unlocking capacity

How buyers free themselves from the transactional treadmill and build the room to partner strategically — the operating models, tools and routes to market that create space to think.

THE REPORT FOUND

Fragility in the supply chain behind critical public services

SO THE ALLIANCE WORKS ON

Resilience & strategic autonomy

Naming the dependency a contract creates, not only its price, and giving buyers practical ways to weigh supply risk, surge capacity and sovereign exposure in the decision.

THE REPORT FOUND

Cultural barriers to new behaviours — a persistent default to the safe, familiar option.

SO THE ALLIANCE WORKS ON

Closing the courage gap

The frameworks, evidence and upskilling that make the braver procurement decision the defensible one, so good intentions survive contact with the approval process.

FLAGSHIP ANALYSIS · 2026/7

Phantom Sovereignty

Making the UK's procurement spend count for strategic resilience.

A heatwave that closes schools. A frontier AI model that goes dark. A critical component that doesn't arrive. Each is a resilience story. Each is a procurement story.

Sovereign capability and resilience has become a policy priority for the UK. The procurement system, meanwhile, continues largely as before.

The result is what we call phantom sovereignty: the appearance of strategic control without the substance. The question is not the nationality of the supplier. It is the nature of the dependency the contract creates. This is not a case for a fortress economy; it is a case for buying in line with how the world now works, and stewarding the industrial and digital capacity the country needs when systems fail.

WHAT THE ALLIANCE IS

A standing platform, not a one-off report.

Four things the Alliance does, continuously. Partners shape where the attention goes; Recurve provides the research architecture and the editorial independence that keeps it credible.

Research

Original evidence

Primary research and analysis that goes beyond the diagnosis — mapping how the system actually behaves and where the levers for change sit.

Tools

Practical frameworks

Turning findings into things buyers can use — frameworks, diagnostics and worked examples that move an idea from paper into practice.

Convening

The rooms that decide

Bringing together the commercial directors, senior officials and leaders who shape procurement, around evidence rather than noise.

Reach

A growing audience

A curated flow of thinking distributed across an established network of public sector leaders and suppliers, growing the constituency for reform.

THE PEOPLE BEHIND IT

Convened and delivered by Recurve.

Recurve provides the research architecture, editorial standards and secretariat that keep the work independent and credible.

ALLIANCE DIRECTOR

Sam Markey

Founder of Recurve and lead author of The State of Procurement Report. Sam authored the World Economic Forum's model policy for innovation-friendly procurement, developed with the Centre for Urban Transformation, and is Senior Associate for Place-Based Impact Investing at the Impact Investing Institute.

POLICY ASSOCIATE

Ben Hawes

Ben ran the secretariat for the government's independent AI Review. Former policy lead on artificial intelligence at DCMS, Head of Copyright and Digital Strategy at the IPO, and the government's policy lead on Smart Cities. He knows how technology policy decisions get made in Whitehall, and who makes them.

Supported by a team of researchers, designers and sector specialists.

QUESTIONS

The things place leaders ask first

  • It asks a single question: how can we best use our resources to deliver our priority outcomes? Those outcomes vary — economic resilience, digital sovereignty, local supply chains, health outcomes, community wellbeing. Purposeful procurement raises ambition on what public spending can achieve and equips decision-makers to act on it, rather than treating social value as a compliance add-on.

  • A coalition convened by Recurve that turns the findings of the State of Procurement Report into a standing programme of research, convening and influence. It brings together organisations with a stake in better public procurement to build the evidence, the tools and the conversations that move the system from lowest cost to strategic value.

  • The report is the evidence base. It diagnosed a system stuck in transactional mode and set out where the opportunity sits. The Alliance takes those findings forward, turning diagnosis into a continuing programme of analysis, practical frameworks and sector engagement.

  • Three ways in.

    • Founding Partners co-own the agenda and the outputs from the front of the coalition.

    • Associate Partners hold named partner status and a seat in the research and the rooms.

    • Network Partners — practitioners and the wider audience — stay close to the thinking, the community and the events.

    The simplest next step is a short conversation about what involvement would mean for you.

  • Partners co-own the agenda and the outputs. Recurve safeguards the editorial independence of the research, which is exactly what makes the work credible and worth associating with. Partners shape what gets examined; they do not buy conclusions.

START THE CONVERSATION

Found the Alliance

If your organisation is serious about the future of public procurement, tell us a little about you and we will be in touch. We are talking to a small number of organisations about founding-partner status.

Prefer to talk? Book a conversation, or email purposefulprocurement@recurve.co.