Collaborative Working in Public Procurement: What the New ICW Playbook Means for You

The Institute for Collaborative Working (ICW) has published a free, practical guide for UK purchasing authorities.  As a member of the Core Team that developed the Playbook, ICW’s legal advisers and an Executive Network Member, Spencer West Partner, Clare Waller explains what it means in practice.

What is the issue?

Public procurement in the UK has long been criticised for defaulting to transactional, compliance-driven relationships between contracting authorities and their suppliers.  Contracts are awarded, terms are enforced, and disputes arise but the opportunity to build genuinely productive, long-term partnerships is too often missed.

This is not simply a cultural problem.  It has real consequences: supply chains that are fragile rather than resilient, innovation that never gets off the ground, and public money that delivers less than it should. The Procurement Act 2023, the most significant overhaul of UK public procurement law in decades, creates both a legal impetus and a practical opportunity to do things differently. However, legislation alone does not change behaviour.

That is where the Collaboration Playbook comes in.  Published by the Institute for Collaborative Working (ICW) in consultation with the Government Commercial Function, the Scottish Government, Welsh Government, and the Northern Ireland Department of Finance, it is a free, practical guide to help procurement teams source collaborative solutions from trustworthy suppliers and build relationships that actually work.

Why does this matter?

I was privileged to serve as a member of the Core Team that developed the Playbook at ICW and in that role I championed both its accessibility and its underlying ethos: the belief that collaboration in procurement is not a nice-to-have but a practical and achievable goal that delivers better outcomes for everyone.  As ICW’s legal advisers and an Executive Network Member, we have seen first-hand how the right frameworks, relationships, and culture can transform the way public contracts are delivered.

Having spent a significant part of my career at the intersection of procurement and contract law, I really welcome resources like this. So much of what goes wrong in public contracts comes down to relationships that were never set up to be collaborative in the first place and that is something the law can only do so much to fix after the fact.

The stakes are high. Poorly structured procurement relationships lead to cost overruns, contested variations, and protracted disputes.  Conversely, where collaboration is embedded from the outset in the way suppliers are selected, contracts are drafted, and performance is managed outcomes are consistently better for all parties, including the public.

What should you be considering?

Perhaps the most important shift is one of mindset. Too often, public procurement is characterised by an instinctive “them and us” dynamic — contracting authorities on one side, suppliers on the other, each protecting their own position. However, genuine collaboration begins well before a contract is signed. When both parties take the time to establish a shared purpose and jointly commit to common outcomes from the outset, something changes: the relationship stops being transactional and starts being productive. That alignment, built early and maintained throughout, is what enables more effective ways of working and, ultimately, better results for the public.

It is also worth recognising that the Playbook is not written solely for the public sector. It serves equally as a practitioner guide for private sector organisations responding to public sector procurement processes. For suppliers, understanding the language, expectations, and collaborative principles that contracting authorities are increasingly being asked to adopt means they can engage from a position of genuine alignment, speaking the same language, demonstrating the same values, and positioning themselves as partners rather than simply bidders. That shared fluency, established early in the procurement dialogue, can make a real difference to how relationships develop and how contracts ultimately perform.

For procurement teams, the Playbook is a practical starting point but reading it should prompt some harder questions about current practice:

• Are your sourcing processes genuinely designed to identify collaborative suppliers or do they simply reward the lowest price?
• Are your contracts structured to incentivise long-term performance or to apportion blame when things go wrong?

For legal advisers, the questions are equally important.  Collaborative working has direct implications for how contracts are drafted, how risk is allocated and how disputes are managed. Relational contract principles, gain-share mechanisms, early warning obligations and collaborative dispute resolution clauses are all tools that can support the kind of working relationships the Playbook advocates but they need to be built in deliberately, not bolted on later.

The Procurement Act 2023 also places new duties on contracting authorities around transparency, supplier engagement, and the management of frameworks.  Understanding how collaborative working principles align with these new legal obligations is something both procurement teams and their legal advisers should be actively thinking about now.

How can we help?

Spencer West advises both contracting authorities and suppliers on all aspects of public procurement and contract law.  As ICW’s legal advisers and Executive Network Members, we bring direct insight into the collaborative working agenda not just as legal practitioners, but as active contributors to its development.  We can help you understand the legal framework surrounding collaborative working, review and strengthen your contractual arrangements, and ensure your procurement processes are aligned with the requirements of the Procurement Act 2023.

If you would like to discuss any of the issues raised in this article, whether you are a procurement professional, a supplier, or a fellow lawyer looking to explore the legal dimensions of collaborative working please do get in touch. We would be very happy to share further background.

Download the Collaboration Playbook free here.