Open source procurement policy exists on paper but has no weighting, audit or skills behind it

The Technology Code of Practice and the Digital, Data and Technology Playbook have required consideration of open source since 2012. Nothing weights openness in evaluation, officials never have to record the comparison, and compliance goes unreported. The Procurement Act 2023 and G-Cloud 15 modernised process without adding open source provisions. OpenUK's UKRI-commissioned recommendations from October 2025 identify the fixes: widen the procurement definition of open source beyond licence to include documentation, contributor support and community development, and train procurement officers to assess it. Today proprietary renewals roll over by default, and open source SMEs like the 23 LocalGov Drupal vendors get no credit for openness or for the exit costs they save.

Procurement is where open source policy dies. Fourteen years of guidance produced almost no measurable shift in the £20bn-plus the public sector spends on technology, because nobody records the comparison and nobody checks.

A Procurement Policy Note under the Procurement Act 2023 making the open source comparison auditable: a recorded total-cost-of-ownership assessment including exit costs, and an openness criterion in evaluation. Training for the commercial function would implement OpenUK's recommendations to UKRI.

// State-led: Instrument: Procurement Policy Note under the Procurement Act 2023 (Cabinet Office).

An off-the-shelf Procurement Policy Note could make openness auditable across £20bn-plus of spend as the Procurement Act beds in, and fourteen years of guidance alone has shifted almost nothing.