Articles

One of the two remaining consortia bidding to run the Ministry of Defence agency Defence Equipment & Support has pulled out of the competition, leaving chief of defence materiel Bernard Gray’s plans for a ‘Government-Owned, Contractor-Operated’ organisation in disarray.

HMRC has opened a voluntary redundancy scheme in an effort to lose around 2,000 staff. Three quarters work in personal taxes and compliance, while a further 480 work in debt management and banking.

A seasoned postman in a small English town explains why, along with 2013, the years 2006 and 2021 have huge significance for Royal Mail

The new Home Office permanent secretary, Mark Sedwill, arrived in Marsham Street soon after having worked in Afghanistan. He tells Joshua Chambers how he’s using his experience to turn the embattled department around.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has requested flexibility to improve the pay of top staff in order to compete with the private sector, senior officials told two hearings of the Commons’ Defence Committee in the last week.

The National Archives are today releasing official records dating back 30 years. Winnie Agbonlahor looks at how civil service reform has evolved over the years - and finds much that is familiar

The civil service isn't able to build its contract management skills quickly enough to keep up with the pace of outsourcing, a report published today warns.

Of all the agendas set out last year in the government’s Civil Service Reform Plan, the fastest progress is being made on ‘digital by default’, a CSW survey has found. Over half (53%) of civil servants said their organisation is making rapid or steady progress on this agenda, and 55% said that the reform would 'dramatically' or 'significantly' improve the civil service.

The Labour party would consider merging “management and bureaucracy” across government departments, agencies and other public services as part of a “zero based spending review” if it wins power at the next election, shadow chancellor Ed Balls said yesterday.

Reforms overseen by the Cabinet Office’s Efficiency and Reform Group (ERG) have generated £10bn savings in the last financial year, ministers have today announced.

The government has appointed six new crown representatives from the business world in order to help Whitehall departments get the best deal out of suppliers. Winnie Agbonlahor introduces the new recruits

The Cabinet Office has created a joint venture company to commercialise government’s portfolio of ‘Best Management Practice’ training tools and services.

The CloudStore is a key part of plans to change the way government buys ICT, but many civil servants don’t even know what it is. Suzannah Brecknell attends a seminar exploring how departments can buy bargains online.

Most central government departments will have to cut spending by two per cent over the next two years in order to fund a £2.5bn investment in infrastructure, it has been reported.

The government has signed an agreement with private-sector partner arvato to manage an independently-run shared service centre, which will run back-office transactions to government departments. The move is intended to create savings of up to £600m a year over seven years.

Efforts to share traditional back office services have been underway for years – but now Whitehall’s specialist units are beginning to sell services such as legal and payment work to their colleagues. Mark Rowe reports.

Most attempts to share services in Whitehall have been pretty disastrous. Joshua Chambers meets Paul Marriner, the man charged with demonstrating that shared services schemes don’t have to be expensive white elephants

Most Whitehall departments will have to move their transaction services – meaning HR, payroll, and accounts processes – into a shared service project by 2014, according to the Cabinet Office’s shared services strategy, published in December.

Sir Paul Jenkins

HM Procurator-General, Treasury Solicitor and Head of the Government Legal Service, Treasury Solicitor’s Department

The Ministry of Defence is struggling to build a financial management system that determines a “single version of the financial truth” and there is a “high risk to delivery” of the department’s strategy for setting out clear management information (MI), according to the Defence Review Annual Report published yesterday by Lord Levene.

The government has repeatedly come a cropper when outsourcing work, but the number of outsourced projects is only going to grow. Mark Smulian attends a round table on how the civil service can become a shrewder customer

The government is looking to establish joint ventures so that some of its intellectual property businesses can enter international markets, Stephen Kelly, government’s new chief operating officer, has told CSW.