A rule younger than it feels
Competitive tendering — the requirement that a public contract go to whichever bidder offers the best value against published criteria, rather than to whoever the buyer happens to know — feels like a permanent feature of how government works. It is not. For most of Britain's history, public contracts were awarded on relationship, patronage and personal favour, and the practice of choosing a supplier by open, advertised competition is, in legal terms, barely older than colour television. Understanding how that change actually happened, and how much older the problem it was fixing really is, changes how a modern procurement failure like Carillion's should be read: not as evidence that a good system has broken down, but as a reminder of what a comparatively young system replaced, and what it did not fully replace it with.
Pepys and the pursers
The earliest well-documented case of someone actively trying to fix public procurement corruption in England involves one of its most famous diarists. Samuel Pepys spent much of his career, from 1660 onward, as an administrator of the Royal Navy — Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board, later Secretary of the Admiralty — and a large part of that career was spent confronting the systematic corruption of naval victualling: the contracts and internal accounting arrangements for feeding and supplying the fleet.
The scale of the problem was structural, not incidental. Ships' pursers, responsible for managing supplies and accounts on board, were paid in a way that made honest dealing almost irrational. Pepys himself put it plainly in his diary in November 1665: “a Purser without professed cheating is a professed loser, twice as much as he gets.” The naval historian N.A.M. Rodger has since described Pepys's reforms to the victualling system as his most important and lasting contribution to the navy — restructuring the incentives so that pursers were encouraged to economise rather than to cheat. Pepys was not a disinterested reformer in the modern sense; his own finances benefited considerably from his official positions, in ways that would not survive scrutiny today. But the historical judgement on his naval administration is nonetheless that he did more than almost anyone of his era to make the system harder to exploit, culminating in a rebuilding programme that, according to his biographers, doubled the fighting strength of the Royal Navy by the time he retired in 1689.
What Pepys could not do, because the tools did not yet exist, was replace discretionary contracting with competitive tendering as a legal requirement. That would take another three centuries.
“Old Corruption” at its height
The system Pepys spent his career fighting did not disappear with him. The historian Philip Harling's standard academic account of British public life between 1779 and 1846 uses the contemporary term for it directly: “Old Corruption” — a system of sinecures, reversions and public contracts distributed to the well-connected rather than the competent, at a scale that peaked during the enormous public spending of the Napoleonic Wars, when the volume of military contracting made the opportunities for patronage larger than ever before (Harling, 1995; 1996). Reform through this period was gradual and contested rather than sudden: pressure built across decades before it produced structural change.
A separate battle: reforming who got the job, not who got the contract
The best-known Victorian reform of British public administration addressed a related but genuinely distinct problem, and the two are worth keeping apart. The 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan Report, commissioned by William Gladstone as Chancellor of the Exchequer, dealt with recruitment into the civil service itself — who got a government job — not with how government contracts were awarded to outside suppliers. Its central recommendation was that entry to the civil service should be by open, competitive examination, replacing a patronage system its authors described bluntly: the service, they wrote, was too often filled by “the unambitious, and the indolent or incapable,” sheltered by generous sick pay and pensions.
The report's own history illustrates just how resistant this kind of reform was to actually happening. Trevelyan leaked details of it to The Times before it was formally released, provoking a backlash from colleagues insulted by its portrayal of the existing service. Prime Minister Lord John Russell wrote to Gladstone, appalled, hoping he was not “thinking seriously of the plan [of] throwing open to competition the whole civil service of the country.” The novelist Anthony Trollope, who had himself secured a Post Office clerkship through his mother's social connections, later satirised Trevelyan as the humourless reformer “Sir Gregory Hardlines” in his novel The Three Clerks. With most of the civil service, the Cabinet and other vested interests opposed, the report's recommendations were not implemented until 1870, sixteen years after they were written — a reminder that even a reform aimed squarely at patronage can take a generation to survive the resistance of the people benefiting from the system it targets.
None of this touched how government bought goods and services from outside contractors. That reform was still a century away.
The actual mechanism: competitive tendering becomes law
The change that finally did what Pepys could not — make discretionary contracting illegal above a certain scale, rather than merely discouraged — arrived through Britain's membership of the European Economic Community. The founding EU public works procurement directive came into force in 1971 and became binding on the UK from its accession to the EEC on 1 January 1973, making competitive, openly advertised tendering compulsory above set thresholds, with contracts required to be awarded against published, transparent criteria rather than a buyer's personal discretion (Council Directive 71/305/EEC). Companion directives extended the same principle to public supply contracts shortly afterwards.
This is worth sitting with for a moment: the legal requirement to award most large public contracts competitively, rather than by relationship, is not a Victorian reform, or even a mid-twentieth-century one. It is younger than the Beatles' final album. For roughly three centuries after Pepys started fighting naval corruption, discretionary contracting remained, in most cases, entirely lawful in Britain.
A separate, later and more narrowly targeted reform is often mistakenly treated as part of the same story. The Committee on Standards in Public Life, chaired by Lord Nolan and established in 1994 after the “cash for questions” scandal, was concerned with the personal conduct of holders of public office generally — MPs' financial interests foremost among them — not with how contracts were tendered. Its Seven Principles still shape the general presumption that public office should be conducted visibly and without personal favour, but it did not write the procurement rules; those had already been in force under EU law for over two decades by the time Nolan reported.
What stayed the same after Brexit
Since the UK's exit from the EU, the same broad principles — fairness, impartiality, transparency — have been carried forward rather than abandoned. The Procurement Act 2023 came into force in February 2025, replacing the EU-derived regulations with a domestic regime built around the same core commitments, alongside the UK's independent accession to the WTO's Agreement on Government Procurement from January 2021. The mechanism changed hands; its underlying logic did not.
What the fix cost, alongside what it cured
None of this history argues for turning back the clock. A system that let a buyer hand contracts to a friend or a well-placed rival's rep, as routinely happened for centuries before 1973, was not a system with an acceptable failure rate; it was a system with a permanent, structural fairness problem, and competitive tendering is a genuine, working answer to that specific problem.
But every fix removes something along with the fault, and this one is worth naming plainly rather than treating tendering as costless. What discretionary contracting bought, alongside the favouritism, was a relationship with something to lose if a contract went wrong — a working connection between buyer and supplier that a purely price-and-criteria-based tender does not replace. A system built specifically to stop a procurement officer favouring a friend was never designed to catch a different failure mode: a supplier winning by bidding a price it cannot actually sustain. That is a different problem from the one competitive tendering was built to solve, and — as the case of Carillion shows in detail elsewhere in this collection — it is a problem the current system still has no reliable answer to.
References
Britannica (2026) ‘Samuel Pepys’. Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Council Directive 71/305/EEC of 26 July 1971 concerning the co-ordination of procedures for the award of public works contracts, OJ L 185, 16.8.1971.
Committee on Standards in Public Life (1995) First Report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life (the Nolan Report), Cm 2850. London: HMSO.
Harling, P. (1995) ‘Rethinking “Old Corruption”’, Past & Present, No. 147, pp. 127–158.
Harling, P. (1996) The Waning of ‘Old Corruption’: The Politics of Economical Reform in Britain, 1779–1846. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
House of Commons Library (2026) The Civil Service [research briefing]. London: House of Commons Library.
Pirate Surgeon's Journal (n.d.) Royal Navy Provisioning, citing N.A.M. Rodger (2006) The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815. London: Allen Lane.
PoliticsHome (2024) ‘Bureaucratic Establishment’, 22 May 2024.
Procurement Act 2023 (UK Public General Acts, 2023 c. 54).
Tanner, J.R. Samuel Pepys and the Royal Navy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [Project Gutenberg edition].
Willis, R. (2019) ‘Testing Times: A History of Civil Service Exams’, Civil Service World, 23 May 2019.
Topics: #PublicProcurement #OldCorruption #SamuelPepys #NorthcoteTrevelyan #NolanPrinciples #EUProcurementLaw #ProcurementAct2023 #CivilServiceHistory