Public AdministrationWritten evidence submitted by HMRC (PROC 43)

Thank you for your letter regarding the PASC Procurement inquiry dated 13 June 2013. I have addressed your request in the order shown:

What GPS mandates apply to what procurements within your department?

The mandation of procurement originated in a PEX (ER) paper, dated 28 March 2011 and this specified the nine in scope categories. Whilst these were essentially “commodities” and, therefore, presented HMRC with limited compliance issues, there was one category which was more problematic and that was ICT. I will pick this point up again shortly.

What categories of procurement does your Department consider to be “common” and therefore would be suitable for management centrally by the GPS within the Cabinet Office?

HMRC are quite flexible in respect of defining what is common although in discussion with MCO my Commercial Director did highlight that some products/services were “Common but Complex”. This is we believe an important point and differentiator.

We were more concerned in this appreciation as to whether there was procurement capability in Cabinet Office (GPS) to deliver our business needs. For this reason, and because we were a major user that possessed specialist procurement skills, we offered to lead two of the nine commodities in scope. This offer was accepted and has worked well.

We have recently advised the Cabinet Office that we are comfortable with the latest centralised procurement model managing all our procurement with the notable exceptions of our strategic ICT and Estates. The former is retained because it is too vital to our core business and the latter because of the complex commercial issues we are managing.

How does your Department determine which procurements to pass to GPS and which should be retained in-house?

Our approach to the balance of spend will be to undertake a product/service by product/service review to understand the centralised team offering and their capability to deliver. In the event we are not content, then it will not be transferred until effective value adding plans and capability can be demonstrated.

Lin Homer
Chief Executive