The Crown Commercial Service’s G-Cloud framework is showing an average of 20% savings against legacy single vendor agreements across government, according to new figures.
The saving was revealed as part of the first annual report of the Crown Commercial Service after it was created in 2014 from the merger of the Government Procurement Service with departmental procurement services.
Overall, the Crown Commercial Service has helped the public sector save £5.9bn in recruitment against a 2009/10 baseline, according to the report.
CCS is aiming to deliver another £800m and £1bn savings next year against a 2014/15 baseline through continued focus on spending on common goods and services, it said.
Sally Collier, chief executive of CCS said: “Our collective aim is to deliver significantly more budget reducing savings, manage more spend on behalf of customers, continue to improve our service delivery and to achieve this with fewer but more capable resources. This represents a huge challenge which I look forward to.”
The overall savings were made up of £1.9bn from centralised procurement of common goods and services, £1.6bn of demand savings from government spending on consultancy and contractors plus £2.4 from “leveraging relationships with suppliers and spending controls”.
It cited a series of memoranda of understanding agreements with major ICT hardware suppliers for resulting in £3m of savings.
In addition a further £85m was found from supporting central government departments with software audits.
£15.1bn of public sector procurement spending was channelled through the CCS centralised arrangements last year, a £1.9bn increase on the previous year.
Directly managed spend increased from £0.6bn in 2013/14 to £2bn in 2014/15, the CCS said, with an aspiration to increase this by £2.5bn and expand the service to more public sector organisations.
“The continued growth of spend channelled through centralised deals indicates that they are not only accessible but also offer value for money through competitive market pricing.
“Additionally, eAuctions have been successfully deployed to aggregate demand for commodity items such as fleet and IT hardware in order to achieve better market prices,” according to the report.
Central Government spend with small business reached 26.1% exceeding the 25% aspiration set by the coalition Government.
The new EU procurement directives were transposed into UK law (the first member state to do so), 14 months ahead of the deadline, with more than 4,000 public sector staff trained on the new rules.
The average time for an OJEU procurement through the CCS was 74 working days, a slight increase on the previous year “due to an increase in the volume and complexity of procurements carried out,” the report said.
