Commercial

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.

A new Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is to become fully operational in April 2014, under plans to merge the Office of Fair Trading and the Competition Commission.

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.

The Ministry of Defence’s procurement arm – Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S) – can only continue to offer current levels of service for the department if some jobs are outsourced, its boss Bernard Gray, chief of defence materiel, told the Commons’ Defence Committee yesterday.

Never mind the NAO; ministers too hate a risk gone wrong

The Department for Transport’s decision to publicly suspend three officials last month when it reopened bidding for the West Coast Mainline franchise was “immoral”, former Labour transport secretary Lord Adonis said last week.

Efforts by the Treasury to incorporate long-term analyses into its budgetary calculations are being hampered by the political calculations of successive governments, Nick Macpherson, permanent secretary at HM Treasury, said on Monday.