Finally, Bennett said that authorities need stop putting all the focus on driving down the cost of procurement, but rather procure intelligently.

He pointed to some local authorities deciding that a single procurement is cheaper, so they put a lengthy list of services on a tender, which could then also be supplied to a number of other local government organisations they have ties to.

However, this could result in one supplier being signed up to do it all, but without the in-house capabilities.

Bennett said: "There seems to be this belief that if you just procure once you save so much money on procurement, so it's fine. But the cost of procurement is entirely dwarfed by picking the wrong supplier to do things.

"If a supplier has to be able to provide accounting software, data networks, internet connectivity, I can tell you now that if they are very good at the internet connectivity part, their accounting software is going to be pretty bloody rubbish."