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05 Mar 2007
The Department for Education and Skills (DfES) is the first government organisation to be put under the microscope as part of the Treasury’s Transforming Government Procurement initiative launched in January (CRN, 29 January).
Under the initiative, the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) has been tasked with carrying out procurement capability reviews across key government departments. Last week, the OGC revealed that the DfES would be the pilot department for the first review.
Sally Collier, director of the OGC’s procurement division, told CRN: “We plan to conduct 10 to 15 reviews between now and early 2008. We selected DfES for the pilot because it is a large-spending department and it is also very keen to participate. We then hope to role out the review across other departments.”
OGC has recruited a team of experts from both the private and public sectors to carry out the pilot review.
“We will assess DfES against a framework to see how they are performing across all areas of procurement,” Collier said. “We will look at whether DfES has appropriate skills to manage their procurement functions; things such as how they manage contracts and make purchasing decisions.”
According to Collier, if the review highlights major issues in DfES’s procurement standards then OGC could carry out a further in-depth investigation. Results of the review will be evaluated in April.
Lee Bevan, managing director of education VAR Leapfrog Computers, said: “Education procurement needs addressing. It would be worth this procurement review looking at how many education projects are selected on price alone and then how many have gone wrong as a result.”
Robin Barker, director at VAR Blueloop, added: “It would be useful if there was a common procurement framework across government as long as it didn’t exclude niche product and service suppliers.”
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