The UK civil service lacks the procurement skills and staffing to meet the government’s technology needs. The claim comes from a new report published by the Public Accounts Committee on June 6.
The British government spends approximately £14 billion on procurement with third party technology suppliers each year. However, the new report draws attention to several allarming facts. Currently, out of the 6,000 employees working at the government’s commercial procurement function, the government dedicates just 15 to the full-time management of technology supplies.
The report highlights the fact that major digital transformation programmes “have often failed to deliver as intended.” As a result, poor technology procurement execution and integration are undermining the UK government’s ability to deliver on objectives. The government’s failure to properly execute digitial procurement objectives is resulting, the Public Accounts Committee argues, in billions of misspent taxpayers’ money.
Missed value calls for major change in UK procurement
Providing the necessary improvements to the government’s tech procurement process will be a “major challenge”. The civil service, according to the report, “is struggling to modernise a legacy environment at the same time as harbouring a major ambition to exploit opportunities from new technologies such as AI,” which the Public Accounts Committee claims could have an impact “as profound as the Industrial Revolution.”
The UK central government—through the Government Commercial Function (GCF) and the Government Digital Service (GDS)—needs, according to the report’s authors, sweeping reform, as well as clarity on their accountabilities for driving change, and sufficient staff with the capability to carry out the department’s ambitions. The 15 “digital experts” in the centre of government dealing with the largest technical suppliers are, they argue, inadequate.
The report’s authors added that they were “not yet convinced that GCF has recognised the scale of the reform needed to address long–standing issues in government’s digital procurement. With at least £14 billion spent on digital procurement across government, there is a need for urgency, and it is time for the commercial function to take this more seriously, particularly given the scale of change in digital technology, the increasing adoption of AI and the need to modernise legacy IT systems. Their acceptance of this position is essential before we can move on to the next stage of improving it.”