About us
Operating at the heart of government, we deliver procurement savings for the whole of the UK public sector.
As a public sector organisation, working on your behalf, we are playing a vital role helping to protect front line services by driving increased spend and savings through our aggregated commercial procurement arrangements. Using our solutions for the core common goods and services you require enables you to focus on the procurement projects of strategic importance to your organisation.
The centralisation, standardisation and aggregation of spend on common goods and services are key mechanisms for delivering significant, sustainable cost reductions; and we play a key role through expert sourcing, category and data management, with a strong focus on excellent customer service.
We are an executive agency of the Cabinet Office and operate as a trading fund set up under the Government Trading Funds Act 1973. We use our supplier commission model positively and transparently to fund our operational costs, and the supplier commission, which varies by category, currently averages just 0.38%.
Our value for money, commercial procurement solutions are fully EU compliant to save you time and money allowing you to focus on the projects of strategic importance to your organisation. They cover energy, travel, fleet, office solutions, communications services, print, professional services, ICT, eCommerce and property & facilities management.
We have expanded our core service offering to become a procurement shared service provider with the addition of transactional processing and strategic procurement support. This enables us to provide you with end to end procurement solutions through self serve, assisted or managed delivery options, underpinned by quality management information and customer service.
Strategic alliances with other public sector buying organisations in local government, health and the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland demonstrate our commitment to working in partnership to combine purchasing volumes, where possible, to improve procurement efficiency and drive increased savings delivery across the public sector.
Our services are delivered by more than 2,000 suppliers, of whom more than 50% are SMEs, helping to deliver the Government’s agenda to support SMEs by making it quicker and less costly to compete for Government business.
We work with over 14,500 organisations in central government, health, local government, devolved administrations, education and the not for profit sectors. In 2011/12 we managed over £8.4bn of public procurement spend, delivering savings of £760m of which £650m came from price savings and the balance from demand management. Spend and savings continue to increase as more organisations move to our arrangements with approximately £1.1bn of savings expected for 2012/13 against an anticipated spend of £11bn.*
A summary of our performance at mid-year 2012/13 can be viewed here.
* In addition, we manage government's control process for consultancy spend and report contingent labout activities which deliver further demand savings for the government