On 29 March, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) published its ‘Small and Medium-Sized Enterprise Action Plan 2019-2022’.

Intended to improve access to business opportunities with the MoD, the plan details how the department intends to increase its procurement spend with SMEs and how it means to work with its major suppliers to remove barriers to supply chain participation.

NDI, the part of Make UK (the manufacturers’ organisation) that represents the interests of the defence and security industry, says the fact that the MoD has chosen to set out this detail now is both timely and welcome — particularly as a number of high-level strategies have been published since the last update to these policies in 2016, firmly establishing the intention of increasing SME participation — albeit without detailing how this would be done.

These include the Modernising Defence Programme, an updated Defence Industrial Policy, and both the National Shipbuilding Strategy and the Combat Air Strategy.

NDI says it therefore “welcomes a plan to deliver against this ambition and its acknowledgement, which we have consistently reiterated — namely, that SMEs are vital to delivering ‘efficient, effective and affordable’ service to the Armed Forces.

“It is also refreshing that this latest action plan acknowledges — for the first time — the critical role that SMEs, and those working in the defence sector in particular, play in sustaining and growing the UK economy.”

There are four sub-sections to the plan, which cover strengthening supplier engagement, improving procurement policy and process, making it easier to do business with defence, and encouraging innovation.

Some of the more ‘eye-catching’ commitments within these sub-sections include: an intent to balance wider economic factors in procurement decisions; the development of a policy to take account of a prospective suppliers’ approach to sub-contracting; and the improvement of the provision of advance notice of procurement opportunities to enable supply chain innovation.

The action plan also details how the MoD will work with its newly appointed ‘SME Champions’ — a process that NDI has offered to support, thereby ensuring that this new grouping helps the defence SME community.