1.25 CCS's original business plan forecast that CCS would grow rapidly and that its frameworks would be used to buy more than £22 billion of common goods and services by 2017-18. Of this £22 billion, £8.5 billion would be from the wider public sector using CCS's frameworks. However, the wider public sector spend through CCS's frameworks decreased from £6.3 billion in 2013-14 to £6 billion in 2015-16. For central government, the plan also forecast that CCS would directly manage more than £13 billion of spend. However, the transition programme to make this happen was suspended; in 2015, it was cancelled. This has meant that CCS has not grown significantly; in fact, CCS frameworks are currently used at similar levels to when CCS was launched.7 This lack of growth in CCS's responsibilities means that CCS has not, and could not, achieve the very substantial benefits that it first set out to achieve.
1.26 CCS has not tracked the benefits and costs of its creation. Although HM Treasury normally requires this information to be reported, net benefits and costs from the initiative have never been recorded. CCS's current management considers that the original targets wrongly estimated the amount of goods and services which could be bought centrally and the activities appropriate for centralisation. It therefore believes the original plan was not deliverable and CCS's current business plan no longer aims to achieve the original targets. In November 2015, CCS lowered its target for taking on department spending during that year from more than £2 billion to £610 million. CCS then reported progress against the new target.
1.27 In Part Two we show that CCS has helped departments and the wider public sector to save money. However, these savings are not directly comparable to the government's original business plan for CCS or to the cost of the government's procurement workforce. Furthermore, the creation of CCS has led to some departments incurring unplanned cost, such as to address service weaknesses and rehired staff to carry out work that they had expected CCS to do. For example, the Department for Communities and Local Government, which transferred all of its procurement staff to CCS, has since recruited three staff members to create an Intelligent Client Function to oversee CCS and bridge gaps in commercial capability left by the transfer of staff to CCS.
________________________________________________________________________________
7 In 2013-14 frameworks created by the Government Procurement Service were used to purchase £11.4 billion of goods and services. In 2015-16 the equivalent figure was £12.8 billion.