Crown Commercial Service (CCS) has been slammed by a government report as “the latest failure” in the Cabinet Office’s attempts to centralise procurement.
The Public Accounts Committee (PAC), which is a a government Select Committee which monitors the government’s public sector spending, has written a damning review of the CCS’s performance.
The outfit is supposed to be managing around £13 billion of spending, but is in fact only currently responsible for £2.5 billion.
Apparently, CCS’ has been a stuff up since it started in 2014 and had a “poorly” executed launch.
Labour MP Meg Hillier, who chairs the PAC, slammed CCS for its “dismal” performance over the last three years.
“Government really needs to sharpen up if this latest attempt to centralise buying is to function properly… This is a dismal showing that calls into question exactly how willing government departments are to accept the authority of the Cabinet Office in this area,” she said.
“There were clearly fundamental problems at the launch of CCS but even now it is unclear exactly how progress will be made during this Parliament and beyond. Meanwhile the taxpayer is losing out.”
The report found that CCS’ management of procurement frameworks “remains unsatisfactory”, and claimed that its current structure makes it “confusing, blurs accountability and reduces clarity of the purpose” of CCS.
The CCS has failed to renew or replace all frameworks before their final expiry dates and before all extension options were used, and claimed that its frameworks do not always offer competitive pricing.
CCS promised the committee that it had fixed its database issue since the summer and that it had improved its management of frameworks.
“However, when we asked CCS about benchmarking prices, it told us that it did not collect information on the prices on contracts and that how it really knew whether it was competitive was through ‘those call-offs and those contracts which are done underneath the frameworks’,” the report said.
