Over £3.8 billion of taxpayer money has been saved by the Crown
Commercial Service (CCS) in the last year alone, as the agency
celebrates its 10th anniversary this year.
CCS centralises government procurement, allowing thousands of
public sector organisations to procure services quicker and
easier, whilst saving taxpayers substantial sums of money each
year.
Over 21,000 public sector organisations are now supported through
the central system, including schools, hospitals and prisons
saving them money on purchases from food to IT and allowing them
to invest in the vital public services each of us use every
day.
Over the last 10 years, 10,000 suppliers have been brought onto
agreements, with over 7,500 of them being SMEs. Supporting SMEs
to win contracts with the public sector, and gain a bigger slice
of the £300 billion a year public procurement pie.
Alex Burghart, Parliamentary Secretary for the Cabinet
Office, said:
Over the past ten years, Crown Commercial Service has brought
substantial benefits to its customers across the public
sector.
Through its offer of a wide range of choices and working to bring
better value across their commercial activity, CCS has already
helped customers to achieve billions of pounds of savings.
I congratulate the CCS on all that it has achieved in its first
decade, and look forward to seeing its continued success and
growth.
Simon Tse, CEO of CCS, said:
CCS's 10-year anniversary is an exciting milestone, not only
because we have so much to look back on and be proud of, but also
because it marks the start of our next chapter.
I would like to say a special thank you to our fantastic team
(past and present) for all of their hard work and dedication –
and to the many amazing customers and suppliers we have had the
pleasure of working alongside.
We are still on a journey of changing and evolving as an
organisation to ensure that we can achieve everything we have set
out to achieve in our ambitious strategy.
CCS, an executive agency of the Cabinet Office, was established
to replace the Government Procurement Service, with the aim of
centralising central government procurement spend and helping the
public sector to better extract value from its commercial and
procurement activity. As a Trading Fund, predecessor
organisations to CCS began in 1991.
It provides commercial agreements which give all public sector
bodies a choice of vetted suppliers who offer the best value,
leveraging the scale of public sector demand. By using these
agreements to source everything from locum doctors and laptops to
police cars and electricity, public sector customers can achieve
commercial benefits such as reduced costs compared to market
prices and better value in contract terms and conditions.
CCS also has responsibility for building commercial skills and
capability across government and the public sector. For example,
in 2022, it announced a commitment to invest £12 million in the
NHS to enable a common procurement platform, Atamis, across the
health service.
Within the first year of the programme significant benefits and
efficiencies have already been realised, with further still
expected as the platform is more widely rolled out.
This includes the North West London Procurement Services, which
provides a single shared service for 9 NHS partner organisations.
The switch to the Atamis system has helped them to identify £34
million of potential savings, allowing them to reinvest into
patient care.
*The methodology for calculating commercial benefits has evolved
since the formation of CCS. The current methodology was
established in FY 2017/18 and provides a like-for-like comparison
to the present day.
