WIREDGOV

This month marks a big milestone in CCS’s calendar: we are celebrating our 10-year anniversary, following a decade of success and delivering value for our customers.

Over the past 10 years we are proud to have gone from strength-to-strength, growing both our team and the commercial solutions we offer – and supporting more and more organisations across the public sector. 

Notable successes over the last 10 years include: 

• Commercial benefits have increased from £606m in 2017/18 to £3.8 billion in 2023/24*
• the choice of approved suppliers on our commercial agreements has increased significantly from 1,700 to more than 10,000 – 7,500 of which are SMEs (a growth of 88%)
• the scope of our commercial agreements has grown to approximately 120 currently live agreements used by over 21,000 customers

CCS was established  in its current form in April 2014 to replace the Government Procurement Service with the aim of centralising central government procurement spend and helping the UK public sector to better extract value from its commercial and procurement activity. As a Trading Fund, predecessor organisations to CCS began in 1991.

It provides commercial agreements to give all public sector bodies a choice of vetted suppliers who offer the best value, leveraging the scale of public sector demand. By using these agreements, to buy everything from locum doctors and laptops to police cars and electricity, public sector customers can achieve commercial benefits such as reduced costs compared to market prices and better value in contract terms and conditions. In 2022/23, CCS helped the public sector to achieve commercial benefits equal to £3.8 billion. 

CCS also has responsibility for building commercial skills and capability across government and the public sector. For example, in 2022, we announced our commitment to invest £12 million in the NHS to enable a common procurement platform, Atamis, across the health service. Within the first year of the programme significant benefits and efficiencies have already been realised, with further still expected as the platform is more widely rolled out. This includes the North West London Procurement Services, which provides a single shared service for 9 NHS partner organisations. The switch to the Atamis system has helped them to identify £34 million of potential savings, allowing them to reinvest into patient care. 

Simon Tse, CEO of CCS, yesterday said: 

CCS’s 10-year anniversary is an exciting milestone, not only because we have so much to look back on and be proud of, but also because it marks the start of our next chapter. 

I would like to say a special thank you to our fantastic team (past and present) for all of their hard work and dedication – and to the many amazing customers and suppliers we have had the pleasure of working alongside.

We are still on a journey of changing and evolving as an organisation to ensure that we can achieve everything we have set out to achieve in our ambitious strategy.

Parliamentary Secretary Alex Burghart yesterday said:

Over the past ten years, Crown Commercial Service has brought substantial benefits to its customers across the public sector. 

Through its offer of a wide range of choices and working to bring better value across their commercial activity, CCS has already helped customers to achieve billions of pounds of savings. 

I congratulate the CCS on all that it has achieved in its first decade, and look forward to seeing its continued success and growth.

*The methodology for calculating commercial benefits has evolved since the formation of CCS. The current methodology was established in FY 2017/18 and provides a like-for-like comparison to the present day.