Figure 9

Common weaknesses

Our assessment of CCS's performance

Our analysis

Targets

The Cabinet Office did not prepare a full business case to support the creation of CCS. Had it done so, it would have been forced to consider other ways of achieving the planned benefits and whether its plans to create CCS, and transition more than £13 billion of spend in less than three years, were feasible. This may have helped the Cabinet Office to evaluate the difficulty of determining the buying that should be centralised and the ways that departments should collaborate to buy services. A full business case may have helped the Cabinet Office to design effective ways to manage these difficulties. This may have led the Cabinet Office to transition spend to CCS over a longer period.

Clear plans

The Cabinet Office did not prepare a single implementation plan or consider how CCS would integrate the procurement services after they were transferred to CCS. The Cabinet Office relied on separate implementation plans for each department. These plans focused on the transition of spend to CCS and did not consider how the services were to be integrated into a coherent service offer for departments. The plans were to be coordinated by a central implementation team, which was responsible for identifying issues and communicating appropriate responses to the project teams. In May 2015 the central implementation team was disbanded after a review by the Cabinet Office found that the team had not delivered its remit.

Inadequate data

The Cabinet Office did not manage the risk that procurement data were unreliable. The Cabinet Office estimated the departmental spend that could be transferred to CCS and departments agreed with these amounts. However, accurate procurement data are difficult to obtain and deciding which services are appropriate to be bought centrally can be difficult. When CCS and departments tried to identify and transfer the procurement activity that was originally planned they found that in some instances these baseline estimates were wrong. Departments were given the freedom to assess what they considered common goods and services. CCS did not analyse in detail what departments had labelled as common goods and services. It took on activities that it now considers should have remained with departments.

Governance, assurance or control

The Cabinet Office did not predict the likelihood that unclear governance would lead to poor accountability and contribute to service failures. The transition programme initially reported to the government's chief procurement officer, who was also the CCS chair. This merged the roles of governance and management and limited the control and accountability of the CCS chief executive.

Customer buy-in

In spite of the Cabinet Office making it compulsory for departments to use CCS, customers rapidly lost confidence in CCS's performance and began to question the risks of transferring their procurement services to CCS. The Cabinet Office did not actively manage the likelihood that departments would be reluctant partners in the initiative.

Source: National Audit Office