Background to the report

Thousands of public bodies buy common goods and services, such as energy, temporary staff, and travel, as well as more specialist items such as defence equipment and pharmaceuticals. In March 2024, HM Treasury, in response to a speech by the head of the National Audit Office, included procurement as one of five areas in which it expects the government to create efficiency savings.

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Scope of the report

This report looks at the efficiency of the central purchasing of common goods and services. It examines:

  • how common goods and services are purchased by the UK public sector
  • whether the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) has achieved its principal objectives of helping the UK public sector get better value for money for the procurement of common goods and services
  • what more CCS and the government need to do to secure greater efficiencies

We did not examine the procurement of major programmes (for example, large infrastructure projects) and we did not look at how organisations outside central government undertake procurement, although we would expect many of our findings to apply across the public sector.

Video summary

Report director Matthew Rees discusses our findings.

Conclusions

Public sector bodies spend around £125 billion each year on common goods and services but public procurement is largely decentralised, with many public sector and private sector organisations operating within the system.

The Government Commercial Function (GCF), working in conjunction with the Crown Commercial Service (CCS), should streamline the central purchasing system to deliver better value for money for the public sector.

More broadly, the government needs to address the profusion of framework agreements. By reducing poor-quality frameworks and supporting CCS to make improvements to its offer, there is scope for the government to significantly improve the value for money for the £125 billion spent on common goods and services each year, of which around £25 billion was spent through CCS’s frameworks in 2022-23.

Since we last looked at CCS in 2017-18, it has grown to become the largest framework provider, and central government departments regard CCS as the default organisation for buying certain categories of common goods and services.

CCS is improving its offering but could make much better use of data and technology to increase transparency and promote competition. CCS should also deliver efficiency benefits through more aggregation of buying, better management of goods and services categories and improved understanding of its markets.

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