Ian McMillan: Creativity is losing out to the box tickers

Good design can make the difference between projects that inspire and those that are just mediocre. Too often, however, creativity is being squeezed out as procurement becomes little more than a box-ticking exercise.

The one-size-fits-all approach – introduced for entirely understandable reasons of ensuring businesses are qualified to do the job – are draining the imaginative ideas that design can bring to public and private projects.

Creative agencies hoping to get involved in major projects have to deal with a number of publicly-funded bodies with very similar – but not quite the same – procurement processes resulting in them wasting so much time and effort to provide duplicate or closely similar information.

Faced with the mind-numbing prospect of filling in acres of forms, many smaller firms give up in despair, leaving the field open only to those bigger companies with the resources and staff to complete the procurement marathon – hardly the result the Scottish Government was looking for when it announced it wanted to open the supply chain to as many small businesses as possible.

Last year, the Federation of Small Businesses in Scotland and Scottish Chambers of Commerce warned smaller firms are being squeezed out of billions of pounds worth of public procurement contracts as local authorities' body, Scotland Excel has sought to merge smaller contracts into larger ones.

When it comes to creativity, our procurement landscape has got things upside down, with the great ideas that should be the life-force of brilliant public projects coming a very distant second – almost an after-thought – to ticking the correct boxes.

That's why we and some other design consultancies have helped the Design Business Association to develop a more streamlined procurement system that will reduce bureaucracy, put creativity at the heart of projects and give smaller companies a chance of winning more business. Hopefully, the Scottish public sector will get on board when the model is finalised.

• Ian McMillan is managing director of Front Page Design