The state is regulating competition out of existence

During my years as a start-up founder, I had the dubious pleasure of navigating the spoken and unspoken procurement rules of Network Rail. To my dismay, I found that discretionary budgets didn’t sit with the operations managers who were the direct clients, nor with the Central Innovation team but under the auspices of the multi-million pound Framework Agreements, with any and all grants conditional on compliance with a Kafkaesque series of rules and regulations. Small players like us could bid, of course, but hardly had a chance against the large engineering consultancies, which had both the funds and expertise to navigate these absurd requirements. Our product was effectively shut out.

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