Cabinet Office seeks senior official to keep an eye on departments' commercial reform plans

New £160,000-a-year "Continuous Improvement Director" asked to track progress against commercial improvement plans departments have agreed with the Cabinet Office


By Matt Foster

02 Jun 2016

The Cabinet Office is on the hunt for a senior official to hold departments to account as they seek to overhaul their commercial operations.

According to the latest figures, government spends some £45bn every year through contracts with outside suppliers.

But while a recent report by MPs on the Public Accounts Committee said departments had made "considerable progress" in sharpening their commercial capability since a 2013 scandal that saw the Ministry of Justice overcharged by two major suppliers, it warned that Whitehall was still struggling to retain senior staff and become "first rate at managing commercial contracts".

The MPs urged the Cabinet Office to do more to "tackle the longstanding problem of a civil service culture that does not place enough value on commercial expertise".


New unit to oversee "enhanced pay and grading structure" for Whitehall's commercial staff
John Manzoni interview: "Guiding people through change always takes longer than you think; it’s always harder than you think"
Civil service chief John Manzoni: centre of government should be less "shrill" and more "helpful" to departments


So far this year, the Cabinet Office has launched a new set of government-wide "Commercial Standards" to try and drive improvement, asking departments to come up with a detailed "Blueprint" on how they will boost their own commercial capability by getting the right staff and governance structures in place.

And a new unit in the Cabinet Office has also been set up which will directly employ commercial experts on an "enhanced pay and grading structure", to try and address long-running recruitment and retention concerns.

The Cabinet Office has now launched a fresh recruitment exercise in a bid to fill a newly-created, £160,000-a-year role, with the successful candidate tasked with ensuring that the latest Commercial Standards are "developed" and "embedded" by departments.

According to the official job specification, the new Continuous Improvement Director will lead a ten-person "Standards and Continuous Improvement" team in the Cabinet Office, reporting directly to government chief commercial officer Gareth Rhys Williams and responsible for "assessing and monitoring how well the standards are being met" across Whitehall.

The Cabinet Office says it wants the successful candidate to have the "credibility to engage constructively across the senior, commercial, and supplier networks", and says they must be able to demonstrate experience of "senior, relevant management experience in large and complex organisations".

"We need a cadre of great commercial talent in all government departments" – government chief commercial officer Gareth Rhys Williams

They will also be expected to help departments share "relevant best practice", whether from inside the civil service or from the private sector. The job specification makes clear that an externally-appointed candidate for the SCS Pay Band 2 role can expect to command an annual salary of £160,000 – while existing civil servants "will be subject to Departmental policy on level transfer and promotion".

Setting out the thinking behind the new role, Rhys Williams – who was brought in from the private sector earlier this year to act as Whitehall's lead official on commercial reform – promised that the new director would be "individually recognised as a senior professional" and given "specialised training and development".

And he added: "We need a cadre of great commercial talent in all government departments; people who can manage our commercial portfolios, who can lead our most complex and novel programmes and projects, people who have the gravitas and depth of experience to work alongside our policy and operational leaders to develop innovative commercial arrangements, including joint ventures, outsourcing and best-in-class contracts. "

The job specification also says the civil service has "committed itself to dramatically improving its commercial performance" following "issues with some major contracts and key suppliers".

Speaking to CSW earlier this year, civil service chief executive John Manzoni stressed the importance of bolstering Whitehall's commercial firepower, saying the organisation had "essentially allowed our own capability inside the civil service to atrophy" in recent years.

Share this page