I am a lawyer in England and Ireland and have the great privilege of living in a pleasant leafy suburb of Belfast. The street is famously lined with and named for Cyprus trees, planted over 100 years ago. And mighty things they are now. I have not climbed any with a tape measure in my teeth, but if they’re not a hundred feet high, I’m sure I won’t be sued for saying they are.
Many of them are evergreen so they provide nesting for birds who tweet happily all year round. Happily, that is, until the wind blows. On the evergreens, there’s plenty of foliage to catch the wind at any time of year. Storm Darragh before Christmas had the trees swaying ominously. Storm Eowyn wreaked havoc.
Four of the great trees came down. Mercifully no one was hurt. But power lines were pulled down, and water pipes were ripped up.
And so, to the good of the procurement law.
In a good deal less than 6 hours after the first of the trees came down, the power and water was back on. Within 24 hours, the fallen trees were removed and the road reopened. Within 48 hours, two other trees whose roots were heaving out of the ground, had been safely dismantled and removed (felled does not cover the intricacy of the operation). The teams carrying out the work completed it in very trying circumstances.
All were procured by, and working for, the public sector or a utility. So, all were subject to procurement law. They weren’t alone – all across the UK and Ireland similar teams were (and still are) in action. Those organising their procurement clearly did a good job. We’ve been involved with work on similar frameworks, and they are not easy.
In this case, the teams doing the work have already been procured, but there is a nagging question in the backs of my neighbours’ minds: why were the trees allowed to grow so high?
Presumably the pointy end of the answer to that question was that no one had been contracted to prune or top them. Budget constraints and local government policy is no doubt the major factor.
But there is no doubt that navigating the procurement regulations played its part. Bad procurement means either procurement that does not comply with the law or procurement that sucks up resources that doesn’t include pruning trees or potentially leads to contracts that don’t get trees pruned as efficiently as possible.
Navigating through the sweet spot in that triangle is a big part of my day job in all the jurisdictions in which I act.
And so, to the future. There’s plenty of work needed to repair the longer-term devastation that Eowyn brought and all the work to prepare for future storms, not to mention the whole built environment of the future. That presents a challenge for us all.
In Quigg Golden, I constantly see the pressures that knock people off the sweet spot of procurement. Knowing the law is a given (although it continues to evolve, both in Ireland but especially in the UK, free as it is from aligning with the EU), but the ability to join up the need and the market is usually the secret ingredient to success which is often missing.
Getting it right gets the world working and just might stop the trees falling on our heads.
Check out Quigg Golden’s procurement consultancy service page here and learn more about the author here.
Published 5 February 2025
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