Commercial

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.