Tom Sykes on Procurement (and a Bit of Magic)
Meet the guest
Watch
Get the Video and Slides
Show notes
Procurement doesn't have to be dreadful — and Tom Sykes makes a compelling case that it's actually one of the most important relationship-building exercises a parish or town council ever runs. Tom is the architect and founder of Common Works, a former Head of Design for Transport for London's property team, and an Expert for the Design Council. He's worked both sides of the public-sector tendering table and arrives with one clear thesis: at the heart of every tender document is a relationship, and the procurement exercise itself is where that relationship starts.
The episode opens with John's standard preamble — Tom's site visits, the physical foam-board model his team built of the Stroud Town Council retrofit (made by a graduate architect, scaled at 1 mm = 50 mm, used so you can imagine walking the corridor before it's built), and the small detail that Tom paid his way through architecture school doing close-up magic in London restaurants — £150 for a lunchtime residency. The one common mistake Tom flags upfront is proportionality: standing orders that demand three quotes for anything over £500 create huge overhead for clerks and waste suppliers' time on tiny pieces of work.
Then Tom's talk. He walks through the fundamentals — the Procurement Act 2023 thresholds (£215k for services, just over £5m for construction), the real cost of running a tender on both sides (clerks underestimating their own time; a small practice like Tom's spending £4–8k preparing a bid for a £40–80k contract; bigger firms spending £10–12k per bid and expecting to win one in ten) — and the big upstream question: do you even need a tender at all?
His three sourcing routes get the same honest treatment. Frameworks can be brilliant — the procurement process is mapped out for you, suppliers are pre-vetted — but the people who sell them are sometimes in morally grey territory; on a TfL project Tom worked on, two failed procurement exercises with the wrong panel ate four months. Contracts Finder is the weakest route because you have no idea who'll read your tender, and small practices self-select out assuming the big commercial firms will hoover it up. The curated short-list, Tom's preferred route, rewards the upfront work of meeting local suppliers and treating them as sounding boards.
The middle of the talk is a working guide to the tender document itself — the layered brief (core values → project ambitions → outputs → appointments required → policy context), the biggest mistakes to avoid (too many docs, too long, inconsistent deliverables, ambiguous priorities), and a five-tier scoring scale (deliberately not out of 100, because percentages make outstanding feel unachievable). Then the punchiest moment of the episode: don't evaluate cost. Tom argues that scoring by lowest price wrecks everyone else's quality scores — "one mad bastard puts in a really low fee, and suddenly the bulk of bids are scoring in the 60s or 70s" — and that deviation from mean is the right mechanism. His rule of thumb: cost no more than 70% of the weighting on construction contracts, and as low as 5% on consultancy.
The outro opens the episode back out. Tom takes a turn back to age 18 — putting on a two-week magic show at the Old Fire Station theatre in Oxford, six months of building props and street magic to drive ticket sales — and offers his younger self the opposite of Julie King's advice on the previous episode: take the world a bit more seriously.
Pay-it-forward: Julie left Tom her question about what piece of legislation he'd change if he could, and Tom answers with the case for a land value capture mechanism on all public projects, using the Jubilee Line extension as the worked example — £3 billion build cost, roughly £13 billion of property-value uplift inside a kilometre of each new station, captured entirely by the people who happened to own land there in the first place. Tom's outgoing question for Jamie Charters (CCLA Investment Management, joining on Episode 9): if you could take one word from another language that does heavy lifting in that language and add it to English, what would that word be?
