[g_p]

There are many ways to prevent material being subject to FOI. Commercial confidence is one, classification/generic national security grounds is another. There are also some good reasons for this - in many cases, there are genuine commercial concerns.

This might be controversial, but it's very hard to have negotiations in good-faith with a company for services, and drive a hard bargain, if the company knows that the pricing offered to government can be FOI'd by a rival or other customer, to get granular price offered.

If you want to get the best value for money, and get below list price, you need the ability to have a commercial negotiation, with the confidence that granular pricing information (i.e. emails with discounted price lists for government customers) aren't becoming public.

That's not to say the total amount spent should be kept secret, but if exact breakdowns of unit pricing were going to be made public, it would likely cost the public more in the inability of government to negotiate around price with suppliers (or rather their unwillingness to enter into such negotiations)

Similarly, any kind of serious negotiation needs to have secrecy - it's very hard in a practical sense to have a negotiation with a party that has to (or might be forced to) publish everything. The number of startups (and even larger companies) that do everything as price-on-request should show industry's willingness to see the kind of price tarnsparency that FOI would expose. And that would give the taxpayer poorer value for money in the long term.

[Nullabillity]

So, what can be done.. mandate pricing and contract transparency for everyone?

Your comment says more about the fucked-up state of industry than anything else (and the backwards regime that enables it).

[g_p]

Pricing transparency might be a sensible approach, but I imagine you'd need international agreement to do so in lock-step, to avoid unintended arbitrage between countries. Such a setup could also perhaps favour non-value-adding middlemen, who would be able to provide unit-price transparency for a product they don't manufacture, and therefore which has a meaningless SKU (reseller-001), that avoids impact on the ultimate seller.

Don't disagree about this being a wider issue, but it's hard to see how you ever force price parity, short of published price lists. But we still have "list price", and people will still negotiate discounts below that "list price". I imagine in the long run, even across industry, we'd just end up back where we're at right now, with opaque price reductions and rebates, and potentially that process ends up more corrupt, as it's less visible?

I don't know what the fix is, but I'm not sure it would be as easy as just requiring everyone to publish transparent pricing and go for pricing parity.

[Nullabillity]

Hence why I mentioned contract transparency. Don't just publish ideal lists, publish the contracts that actually end up being signed. That would also fix the obfuscating-middle-man problem (reseller-001 still needs to be defined somewhere).