UK Government frameworks agreements aren’t dead but they will be approached differently in the future. And not all frameworks have survived the Cabinet Office review (as highlighted in our Predictions 2013: UK public sector SITS). The Application Development, Delivery & Support Service (ADDSS) and Hosting Services procurements have ceased from today and Service Integration & Management Services (SIAM) will not be progressed down the framework route. The Cabinet Office statement from Chloe Smith, Parliamentary Secretary, states that “Government ICT frameworks will only be agreed where they are shown to deliver against the Commercial ICT Strategy and can attract businesses of all sizes”. Bill Crothers, Chief Procurement Officer (pictured), cites the G-Cloud framework and the Public Services Network (PSN) framework as examplars of good practice.
We had been concerned about the proliferation of Framework Agreements across Government. It seemed strange, for example, for a Hosting Service framework to be procured when already there were numerous hosting companies listed on the Government Cloudstore (G-Cloud framework). Our fear was that Government Organisations would become increasingly confused about which procurement route to take. We had also heard concerns from SMEs that some of the frameworks being procured were SME 'unfriendly'. Memset, for example, which has had its hosted services accredited on the Cloudstore, believed that the now-canned Hosting Framework had been designed around the capabilities of the largest providers.
One of the key drivers behind this review has clearly been to make all frameworks open to SMEs as well as the larger players. Crothers has highlighted that the frameworks that have been cancelled didn’t have enough SMEs involved and that they weren’t seeing innovation coming from the suppliers that were bidding. This is clearly another kick in the teeth for the leading IT services suppliers who are being told that there is no place where SMEs shouldn’t be playing; there is also the insinuation that the large players are failing to be innovative enough.
The good news though, for all involved, is that frameworks will be designed such that if a supplier gains a place on a framework they are more likely to win work. No supplier – whether big or small – enjoys wasting time and effort on bidding for frameworks with no guarantee of any future revenues. Having said that, only time will tell if this will be true of the Cloudstore (which has been held up as a good reference); it is our belief that those who have had early wins (and have been accredited early) will go on to win the vast majority of business. Many of the suppliers on the Cloudstore are unknown entities and we al know how risk-averse governmnet organisations can be.