THE government celebrated the Crown Commercial Service’s 10th anniversary last month, claiming this special “procurement department” had “saved taxpayers £3.8 billion last year alone.”  

But the Crown Commercial Service was central to some of the worst Covid contracts, and arguably sometimes limits competition for government work. Crown Commercial was set up by the Tories, but Rachel Reeves has expressed enthusiasm for its methods, so it may hang around under a Labour government too.

The Crown Commercial Service (CCS) was set up by David Cameron’s privatisation guru Lord Maude in 2014: this Cabinet Office department tries saving money by organising cross-departmental purchasing.

Suppliers are pressed to reduce prices with promises of big sales to multiple departments. This typically involves “frameworks” in which CCS negotiates prices with suppliers, who in return are put on a framework. Individual departments then buy goods or services from firms in this framework.

When government financial watchdog the National Audit Office (NAO) looked last year at CCS figures it found supposed savings were not as clear as claimed. 

The NAO found CCS measures savings by comparing framework prices to “estimations of prices charged by suppliers outside the framework.” However, the Cabinet Office admitted needing “more structured data and more effective processes” to “monitor savings effectively.”

More importantly, the NAO pointed out “frameworks can reduce competition when not used effectively” — there is an initial competition for firms to get on frameworks, but departments then only run “shortened call-off process for contracts to be awarded to one of those framework suppliers.” This does not work well for services that aren’t “common.” Some government contracts are inherently “uncommon” as they are for specialist public services, not basic products. The NAO says frameworks are “not always the way to achieve the best competition,” especially for more specialist services.

The NAO gives the example of the Department of Education (DfE) commissioning a free schools meal voucher system during Covid, so eligible kids could still get food support when schools were closed in 2020. The DfE used the CCS “framework,” picking out pre-approved contractor Edenred, without competition. However, there was “limited evidence on Edenred’s capacity to deliver the voucher scheme,” which soon ran into problems. 

A proper competition could have exposed these: there are other examples of government awarding contracts to the same limited number of big outsourcing firms from the “frameworks” during Covid, with poor results, like Serco’s £108m “contact tracing” service, a privatised version of a basic public health measure that performed poorly.  

The NAO says the government “does not assess whether, or to what extent, the number of suppliers on a framework affects competition.”

It says the government awarded “72 per cent of its large contracts through frameworks in 2021-22 compared to 43 per cent in 2018-19.” The Cabinet Office claims big financial savings based on its estimates, but there is no evidence this improved performance on outsourced contracts.

I asked the Cabinet Office about the NAO questions over “frameworks,” but they insisted that there were “competitive processes to award framework agreements.”

It would be nice to think the Crown Commercial Service and its empty boasts of money-saving would fade away with the Tories. The association of its frameworks with the some of the worst of the Covid contracts, heavily criticised by Labour at the time, should spell its end. 

But sadly Rachel Reeves seems to think otherwise. She intends to launch an “office for value for money” in the Treasury, to monitor government contracts. 

Reeves said it would be created by “bringing together people who are already supposed to be doing this sort of stuff in the Treasury and at the Crown Commercial Services at the Cabinet Office.”

A big-sound political duo

IF YOU LIKE your music to be both political and loud, I fully recommend you buy Humble as the Sun, the third and latest album by Bob Vylan, released in April.

Bob Vylan are a crossover punk/grime act, so they have the noisy guitars that mean they can get a positive review from Kerrang magazine, mixed with some electronic dance sounds, topped with a rap-style vocal. They rap sometimes angry, sometimes funny, often political lyrics.

For older listeners (like me) they have a touch of political rap like Michael Franti’s Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, with a similar balance  between the social lyricism of Gil Scott Heron and the hardcore sloganeering of Public Enemy. For more modern ears, lyrically, and sometimes musically, they have a bit of a feel of grime star Kano at his most political.

Musically, they sometimes drive along like a fast car — like with the Dead Kennedys’ style Batman guitar of Dream Big, a song which namechecks  Karl Marx while describing a life of scrabbling and hustling — or bump along like a big truck with the crunchy Rage-Against-The-Machine feel of Hunger Games.  

Like many of the tracks, this song is full of socially conscious word play (“The kids aren’t all right / We need a way to feed our offspring / My brethrens’s doing a stretch ’cause he wasn’t taking what they’re offering / But he was offering what they’re taking / Judge found out and he locked him”). 

The “grimier”-feeling Reign has an electronic musical bounce, with lyrics that go from overcharging landlords to the royal family to dealing with racism in both its patronising and confrontational forms.

A lot of the tracks have a touch of black humour — in both senses — about them. If you catch Bob Vylan live — they are touring in support of this album — you get a strong feeling of their wit and warmth as well as their musical militancy. This humour also comes to the fore on this album in the track He’s a Man, a mickey-take of a default white bloke.

Bob Vylan make a big sound given they are a duo. They have also stayed independent, self-releasing their albums to avoid any major-label censorship, but have still made a big impact, with a decent chart performance for an act without major backing. Their independence means they haven’t felt pressure to compromise their politics in this, their latest, or either of their preceding (and also highly recommended) albums.