1 October 2010 |
Lindsay Clark
Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has stepped up the
government’s programme of renegotiating supplier deals during a meeting
yesterday with 30 of its biggest suppliers.
The session, with
firms from the construction, legal, finance and IT sectors, is the latest in
the coalition’s bid to become a “single customer” and to eliminate the
differences individual departments pay vendors for identical goods and
services.
“It is about
changing the way government does business over the long term,” said Maude, who
is also joint chair of the Efficiency and Reform Group. “We’re going to be
looking really closely at the way companies provide services to government and
at what we can do to ensure we establish government as a single, more efficient
customer.”
In July, Maude met with 19 top government IT suppliers and has since secured a
memorandum of understanding (MoU) with three of them to reduce costs. “We
expect more to be signed over the coming weeks,” he said. “When this first
process is complete it is likely to deliver savings running into hundreds of
millions of pounds. Although renegotiating contracts in this way had never been
done by government before, it has proved to be a success for all sides
involved, particularly the taxpayer.”
The government is
seeking to reduce supplier costs in an effort to cut its £155 billion budget
deficit.
Yesterday’s meeting included
construction firms Atkins,
Balfour Beatty
and Carillion,
legal firms Pinsent Masons
and DLA Piper,
together with financial and business services firms Deloitte,
KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
