During a Civil Service Live session, a civil servant working on a pathfinder ‘Lean’ procurement project warned that the Efficiency and Reform Group’s (ERG’s) spending control regime is making a “mockery” of efforts to speed up purchasing.
The official is procuring a main supplier for the Home Office’s Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS), comprising the Criminal Records Bureau and the Independent Safeguarding Authority. The DBS is due to launch by November, but he complained that “we’ve now got an incredibly frustrating situation where the approval stage at the ERG has been held up for literally months; where we’re not even allowed to announce our intention to award.”
The ERG’s control regimes are designed to reduce spending and test decision-making processes. But the official warned that delays within its approval process are “injecting huge risk” because as service delivery deadlines draw close, the Home Office may have to extend its contract with existing suppliers rather than completing its Lean procurement. This could mean that all the savings the team has worked for would “go out of the window”.
“It makes a mockery of having people from the business and supplier sides working incredibly hard to get it through,” he said.
Pippa Bass, the ERG’s deputy director for procurement capability and process improvement, responded that the ERG has worked to improve procurement but hasn’t yet identified “those layers of approvals, both within the organisation and the central controls brought in by the coalition government,” which need to be better integrated with procurement.
“That is being addressed,” she said, but “I think it’s for Cabinet Office and Treasury to work together much more closely and understand what approvals [are required] and then to streamline that process much more effectively. That is a very good challenge for the centre.”
Meanwhile, former Cabinet Office permanent secretary Ian Watmore told CSW that there’s always going to be an inherent tension in the spending controls system because “people generally agree with saving money… but they don’t like the fact that they have to as for permission from the Cabinet Office to be able to do anything.”
The Cabinet Office said there are “no delays” with the DBS purchase, adding that the ERG has pledged to make decisions within 28 days.