Commercial

The Home Office “poorly planned” and “badly managed” its commissioning of asylum-seekers’ housing, the Public Accounts Committee said last week, and the project “is unlikely to yield the savings intended.”

The Crown Commercial Service has started purchasing energy tariffs for all government departments, launching a project last week to invite bids for a 15-year deal from renewable energy generators.

The Ministry of Defence’s Defence, Equipment and Support (DE&S) division was this month turned into an arm’s-length body and given an exemption from Treasury salary controls and civil service-wide promotion criteria.

Outsourcing giant G4S has been cleared to bid for government contracts after it was barred from doing so earlier this year following an over-charging scandal.

Government contracts should be audited by the National Audit Office (NAO) to improve transparency about public service outsourcing, business organisation the CBI has said.

Universal Credit has been stymied by confused accountability and a “very, very poor set of decisions,” Public Accounts Committee chair Margaret Hodge has told CSW.

Serious questions remain about accountability for Universal Credit in light of Robert Devereux and Iain Duncan Smith’s latest appearance before MPs, the Institute for Government has said.

Government does not know the impact of its schemes to provide SMEs with access to finance, nor how much of the money invested in the schemes has reached small companies, according to a Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report published yesterday.

Government’s use of payment by results contracts will inhibit its ability to buy services from charities and social enterprises, the Institute for Government has warned.

The Crown Commercial Service (CCS) is to expand from 600 staff to around 1,000 by 2016-17.

But if the Treasury gives way, civil servants could do the job.

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.