Britain Is Leaving £20 Billion on the Table, and Fragmented Data Is the Reason Why

Every pound spent with a local, regional supplier works harder for the economy than the same pound spent somewhere else. According to new analysis from the British Chambers of Commerce, money spent locally generates roughly £1.76 in wider economic value for every pound, compared with only around £0.36 when that same spending leaves the area. That is nearly a fivefold difference, sitting quietly inside Britain's public procurement system, mostly untapped.

On 25 June 2026, the BCC put a number on exactly how much that gap is costing the country. At its Global Annual Conference, the organisation launched a new report, A Smarter Way to Deliver Infrastructure: The Great British Supply Chain, and the figures inside it are hard to ignore for anyone working in procurement, economic development or supplier diversity.

The headline numbers

Small and medium sized enterprises make up around 99 percent of all UK businesses. Despite that, they currently receive only about 22 percent of direct public procurement spend. The government has set its own target of 33 percent. Closing that gap, the BCC estimates, would redirect up to £20 billion a year into regional economies across the country.

Twenty billion pounds is not a rounding error. It is roughly the scale of investment that could meaningfully shift the fortunes of towns and regions that have spent years watching public contracts get awarded to the same handful of large, often non local, suppliers. The report draws on the BCC's own experience across major infrastructure projects, including Hinkley Point, Crossrail and Sizewell, to argue that procurement reform is one of the fastest practical levers available for boosting regional growth.

BCC Director General Shevaun Haviland was blunt about the stakes when she introduced the report. Public procurement, she said, "should be one of the most powerful tools we have" to drive growth across the UK, yet the system as it stands remains needlessly complex and fragmented, and routinely shuts out many of the businesses best placed to deliver real impact. Her full remarks, along with the report's recommendations on simplifying procurement rules and embedding Local Skills Improvement Plans into major projects, are available on the British Chambers of Commerce website.

Progress is real, but it is wildly uneven

It would be unfair to suggest nothing has changed. A separate BCC report, produced with the procurement intelligence firm Tussell and published only a few weeks before the Great British Supply Chain launch, found that direct public sector spend with SMEs reached a six year high of 21 percent in 2025, worth around £45.2 billion, up from 19 percent the year before. That is genuine progress, and it is worth acknowledging.

Look closer at where that progress is coming from, though, and the picture changes. Local government delivered the lion's share of the improvement, directing roughly 34 percent of its procurement spend to SMEs in 2025. Central government and the NHS, by contrast, stayed essentially flat, at around 16 percent and 10 percent respectively. Full detail on that tracker is available from the BCC.

In other words, the parts of government with the most local knowledge and the most direct relationships with their own business communities are doing comparatively well. The parts of government managing the largest, highest value, most centrally run contracts, the ones that would do the most to close the £20 billion gap on their own, are barely moving. That split tells you almost everything about where the real barrier sits.

Good intentions are not the problem

For years, the conversation around opening up procurement to smaller and more diverse businesses has focused heavily on willingness. Buyers, the argument usually goes, simply need to want it more.

That framing has always undersold the actual obstacle. Most procurement teams inside large organisations and central government departments genuinely do want to work with a wider range of suppliers, including women owned, ethnic minority owned, disability owned, LGBTQ+ owned and veteran owned businesses, along with social enterprises rooted in the communities they serve. What they lack is not intent. It is a practical, reliable way to find, verify and onboard those suppliers fast enough to meet a live contract deadline.

This is precisely why central government and the NHS lag so far behind local authorities. A council procurement officer often knows their local business community personally, through chambers of commerce, local networks and years of relationships built one contract at a time. A national department managing thousands of suppliers across the whole of the UK has no equivalent shortcut. Without good data, scale becomes the enemy of inclusion rather than its ally.

Why the multiplier effect matters beyond economics

The £1.76 to £0.36 gap is not just an interesting statistic. It is a direct argument for why regional growth and supplier diversity are, in practice, the same project rather than two separate ones.

A contract awarded to a multinational supplier with a head office somewhere else tends to generate value that flows straight back out of the region it was spent in. A contract awarded to a business that is genuinely rooted in that region, employing local people and reinvesting locally, keeps generating value long after the invoice has been paid. Diverse owned businesses are disproportionately represented among exactly this kind of rooted, regional supplier. Supporting them through procurement is not a separate social objective sitting alongside economic growth. It is one of the more efficient ways to produce that growth in the first place.

What it would actually take to close the gap

Simplifying procurement rules, as the BCC's report recommends, will help. So will embedding skills planning into major infrastructure projects, and committing to longer term investment programmes so that smaller suppliers can plan ahead with some confidence rather than chasing one off opportunities.

None of that solves the underlying data problem on its own, though. A simpler set of rules still depends on a buyer being able to identify who the qualified, diverse, regionally rooted suppliers actually are. Without that visibility, even the most well intentioned reform tends to default back to the same familiar shortlist, because that is what is fastest to put together under pressure.

This is the layer GoDiverse focuses on. Our Unified Database brings together verified profiles of diverse owned suppliers from across the UK, covering all the major categories of underrepresented ownership, and makes them searchable by region, sector and capability in a matter of minutes rather than weeks. For procurement teams trying to close the gap between local government's 34 percent and central government's 16 percent, that kind of searchable, current data is often the missing piece, not a lack of willing suppliers and not a lack of willing buyers.

A few concrete things change once that data is in place. Buyers can identify capable, regionally based suppliers for a specific contract almost immediately, rather than relying on informal networks that happen to favour whoever they already know. Procurement and ESG teams gain the verified evidence they need to report honestly on social value and supplier diversity commitments, rather than estimating. And smaller, diverse suppliers stop being invisible to exactly the buyers, central government departments and large enterprises among them, who could use the £20 billion the BCC has identified to genuinely change their prospects.

Train operator Avanti West Coast is one example of what this looks like in practice. Its sustainable procurement team has spoken publicly about choosing GoDiverse precisely because it covers a wider range of diversity categories than other platforms they considered, while remaining cost effective to run at scale. That kind of breadth matters for exactly the reason the BCC report identifies. A platform that only surfaces one or two categories of diverse supplier, or one that only covers a narrow patch of the country, will not move the needle on a £20 billion regional opportunity. Genuine coverage, across ownership categories and across every region of the UK, is what turns a procurement target on paper into contracts actually awarded.

A turning point, if the data keeps pace

The BCC's report is, at its core, an acknowledgement that the old approach to public procurement has been quietly holding back regional economies for years. That is a significant thing for one of the country's leading business organisations to say plainly, and it adds real weight to a case that supplier diversity advocates have been making for some time.

The opportunity is exactly as large as the numbers suggest. Twenty billion pounds a year, redirected toward the regional and diverse businesses that tend to reinvest it locally, would be one of the more consequential shifts in UK public spending this decade. Getting there depends less on further good intentions, which already exist in good supply, and more on giving procurement teams the visibility they need to act on them.

If your organisation wants to move past good intentions and start closing this gap with real, verified supplier data, book a demo with GoDiverse and see how our Unified Database can connect you with the regional, diverse suppliers already capable of doing the work.