The Public Procurement legislation is once again in the spotlight. The Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Property (Amendment) Bill, 2026, has passed the House of Representatives but, at the time of writing, there is no final outcome
As a result this column makes no pronouncement on its merits. Instead, I want to point out that I have followed the procurement legislation from its inception in 2010 and, after sixteen years, there is a wider issue worth considering. That issue is value for money.
Legislative proposals on public procurement and replacing the Central Tenders Board Act were laid in Parliament in June 2010 under the People’s Partnership. A Joint Select Committee began considering them during that parliamentary session. Its work was unfinished when the session ended, and a new JSC was established in November 2011 to continue the process. Progress was difficult and in the 2014 Senate debate, then Planning Minister Bhoe Tewarie explained that the committee had reached a stalemate over whether it should formulate procurement policy or Government should provide it. In the end Cabinet eventually supplied a policy.
A Procurement Bill passed the Senate in June of that year but later lapsed. A second Bill returned later that year. It passed the House on December 5 and the Senate on December 16, received presidential assent on January 14, 2015 and became Act No. 1 of 2015.
The PNM inherited the legislation and spent much of its decade in government amending the legislation. The 2016 amendments created a Public Procurement Review Board. The 2017 amendment reduced the Regulator’s term from seven years to five. Amendments in 2020 introduced exemptions covering legal services, financial services associated with debt financing of the national budget, accounting and auditing and specified medical services.
After amendments came regulations which took further time. The Minister of Finance laid ten procurement regulations in Parliament in July 2021. The remaining substantive provisions eventually came into operation on April 26, 2023, more than eight years after presidential assent. Further amendments followed in 2023. Here we are in September 2026 where another amendment Bill is again occupying Parliament.
Trinidad and Tobago has therefore devoted considerable legislative, institutional and political effort to governing how the State purchases goods and services. Given the billions involved, that attention is warranted.
Even with all that discussion which focusses on the procurement process, the most important part is almost completely left out of the discussion.
The existing legislation does consider value for money, but our discussion around the legislation hardly mentions it. Section 5 makes accountability, integrity, transparency and value for money objects of the Act, alongside efficiency, fairness, equity, public confidence, local industry development, sustainable procurement and sustainable development.
More important is the statutory definition. The Act describes value for money as the optimal balance of outcomes and input costs, based on total cost of supply, maintenance and sustainable use.
Read those words carefully: outcomes, total cost, maintenance and sustainable use.
In the context of public procurement, value for money therefore begins before tendering. We first establish the problem, expected outcome and whether the proposed expenditure is an appropriate solution. Procurement then determines how we acquire what is required within the law. After procurement comes implementation, operation and maintenance. Eventually we should be able to determine whether the outcome that justified spending the money actually occurred.
This is important because approving expenditure and spending money are two different things.
Implementation
Implementation is a big issue in T&T and if you track budgeted expenditure against what is actually incurred over the course of the year you will find significant implementation gaps.
Underspending has many causes. Funding can be delayed, priorities can change, projects can be inadequately prepared, procurement can take longer than anticipated and contractors can fall behind. Spending simply to improve an execution rate would be equally poor financial management.
The proper analysis follows the money. How much was allocated, released, committed and paid? What work was completed, what service became available and what outcome resulted? Those are different questions to which contractor got the contract, but it is not politically divisive, so it doesn’t see the headlines.
The implementation problem also predates the current procurement regime. For fiscal 2022, before the main provisions became operational, revised PSIP expenditure represented 84 per cent of the allocation. The 2023 PSIP identified longstanding projects without discernible end dates, duplication, inadequate project readiness and insufficient documentation among the challenges affecting implementation.
Implementation is therefore as important to value for money as procurement. A properly awarded contract can be delayed. A completed building can remain underutilised. Equipment can arrive without the people or supplies required to operate it. Money can remain unspent while the original problem continues.
There is an economic cost while we wait. Think of the Central Block at the Port of Spain General Hospital. It is both opened and unopened, outfitted and not out fitted at the same time. We are good at counting the cost of a contract but not so good at assessing value for money and many of the costs created by delay and poor execution occur elsewhere in the economy and either go unrecorded or are ignored, sometimes it’s both.
Then we come to a part of public expenditure that receives far too little attention: maintenance.
The word is already in the statutory definition, yet our governance culture gives considerably more attention to building and commissioning assets than maintaining them. The financial principle is straightforward. When we fail to maintain an asset, we consume part of the value created by the original expenditure.
Medical equipment that is unavailable because servicing, parts or technical support were not properly provided produces no diagnostic value while it sits idle. Maintenance therefore belongs in the original investment decision.
If we construct a facility for $500 million, we need to know what it will cost to operate, maintain and refurbish over its expected life, who is responsible and where recurring funding will come from.
The OPR’s own guidance recognises whole life costing and total cost of ownership. International public investment frameworks do the same. IMF’s Public Investment Management Assessment specifically examines maintenance funding as part of infrastructure governance.
Anyone buying a house understands that the purchase price is only the beginning. Roofs, plumbing and electrical systems require attention. Ignore them long enough and the eventual bill becomes much larger. The State should understand its assets in exactly the same way.
The return
This brings us back to value for money.
Our legislation already gives us the definition. I wish to highlight that we should apply it across the entire life of public expenditure.
Before we spend, establish the need and the outcome we are trying to purchase. Examine alternatives and calculate the full lifecycle cost. Procurement only determines how the required objective or object is acquired. We need to consider implementation which determines whether it is delivered as expected. We need to consider maintenance because that preserves the value created. Post project evaluation tells us whether the original problem was solved. How much of this forms part of the national discussion?
In finance there is a concept called a return on investment. It is time we focus on the return on public expenditure. The return has to correspond with the reason we spent the money.
Applied to the forthcoming Budget, this would change the conversation. We will hear that one ministry receives $5 billion and another receives $7 billion. We will debate whether allocations increased or decreased and whether expenditure is recurrent or developmental.
Those figures are important but they cannot tell us whether we received value for money.
For every major expenditure we should know the problem, expected improvement, lifecycle cost, responsible institution and when the benefit should appear. Afterwards somebody has to go back and check.
That last step is critical.
We have spent 16 years debating and refining the governance of procurement. That effort has produced legislation, amendments, regulations, institutions and another Bill before Parliament today. Procurement deserves that attention because billions of dollars of public money pass through the system.
Those billions deserve an equally rigorous system for determining what happened after the money was spent. Value for money begins with need, continues through procurement and implementation, survives through proper maintenance and ends with evidence of results.
When you are running budget deficits as we have done consistently for over 15 years and where our debt burden is increasing and we have less to spend on delivery and more to spend on interest payments, value for money becomes the defining feature of whether T&T advances or whether we continue to slide down an ever slippery slope.
After 16 years debating procurement, we need to switch to a conversation about value for money because that covers procurement and more.
Ian Narine is a financial consultant who understands the difference between value and price. Please send your comment to ian@iannarine.com
