Commercial

The communities department’s approach to coordinating firefighters has been criticised by MPs for leaving too much planning in the hands of local teams.

Public service mutuals have been given too much “soft finance” – non-repayable grants – as they spin out of local and central government, which has “lowered the bar” and allowed “some mutuals to spin out without developing the right capabilities and plans,” according to a report published by the Cabinet Office today.

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.

The Cabinet Office approved Department for Transport requests to hire external advisers for its West Coast Mainline franchise project, the government’s chief procurement officer Bill Crothers said earlier this month, so the spending controls didn’t contribute to the scheme’s collapse.

The National Audit Office (NAO) will “start doing comparative reports of similar activities in departments” from next year, comptroller and auditor general Amyas Morse has said.

The Home Office has outsourced its payments processing to NS&I, the state-owned savings bank, it was announced earlier this month.

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 efforts of Companies House (CH) to tackle fraud should be based on “strengthening the current model rather than radically changing company law”, its chief executive has told CSW, to ensure that anti-fraud work doesn’t weaken transparency in business information or create additional burdens on business.

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.

Giving evidence at a Public Administration Select Committee hearing on Monday, Bill Crothers complained that departments often refuse to give the Cabinet Office information on contracts signed with suppliers, on the basis that doing so would breach commercial confidentiality.

The British public sector now runs more big outsourcing contracts than the private sector, according to market intelligence services company Information Services Group (ISG). Counting public contracts worth more than £3.4m per year, ISG has calculated that the public outsourcing market expanded by 16 per cent in 2012, bringing it to a total of £3.7bn annually: 55 per cent of the UK’s outsourcing market.

The collapse of the West Coast Mainline franchising process won’t deter the Department for Transport (DfT) from taking necessary risks, the department’s permanent secretary has promised in an interview with CSW.

All civil servants should be trained in design principles such as using prototypes and involving users to create solutions, according to a report published today by the Design Commission, an industry-led group that investigates how design could address public policy problems.

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.

A new network of research centres providing independent evidence to inform decision making in key policy areas will help to improve policy making in the civil service, according to Will Cavendish, executive director of the Cabinet Office's implementation unit.

Organisations providing employment support through the Work Programme are failing to support people from the hardest-to-help groups, despite financial incentives set up to encourage contractors to focus on these claimants, according to a Public Account Committee (PAC) report published today.

Reforming the civil service won’t “in itself make a dramatic difference to government effectiveness,” former cabinet secretary Lord O’Donnell told the Public Administration Select Committee today. Instead, government needs to ensure it is clear about what it wants to achieve, he added.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) should set out an explicit industrial strategy for defence procurement, the Commons’ Defence Committee said in a report published yesterday. Such a strategy would ensure that procurement decisions take account of their likely impact on British businesses, rather than simply pursuing value for money.

Commissioners from across the public sector can now apply to join a virtual Commissioning Academy, launched last week.

The chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, Sir Christopher Kelly, has warned in an article written for Civil Service World that new ways of providing services – including academies, clinical commissioning groups, and increasing delivery by the private and voluntary sectors – will place extra pressures on ethics in public service delivery.

The lack of a senior responsible owner for the West Coast Rail franchise project was the “biggest problem” behind the failure of the bidding process, Sam Laidlaw told the House of Commons Transport Committee yesterday.

A set of new ‘masterclasses’ that aim to help the voluntary and community sector (VCS) to secure public sector contracts were announced by the Cabinet Office  last week.

HMRC’s customer services operations have improved from their low point of 2010 but still represent poor value for money to the taxpayer, a report by the National Audit Office (NAO) concluded yesterday.