Sit on a roundtable of small businesses – as I have on many occasions – and it won’t be long before the topic shifts to the maddening number of rules and regulations that companies have to comply with if they want to sell to government.

At one point, vendors are asked about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.

Since the Social Value Act passed in 2012, companies bidding on public tenders are not only graded on value for money for the taxpayer (note: that’s you reader), but also on an amorphous concept known as ‘social value’. What this means, in plain English, is that it is no longer enough to provide a good product at a competitive price to win a tender. Bidders that offer worse value

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