NHS England’s commercial directorate will outsource management of several key areas of its work, according to details of the national commissioner’s planned procurements published last week.
Data on the centre’s pipeline of upcoming procurements, published last week, revealed the commercial team will seek a “strategic commercial delivery partner”.
It added: “The required services are likely to entail supplier(s) managing a full breadth of commercial capabilities across complex or innovative programmes.
“This will include complex commercial programmes and strategies, major commercial efficiency and change programmes, supply chain management, and technology.”
The outsourced functions will be worth between £25m and £50m over three years, or between £8.3m and £16.7m a year.
The procurement pipeline is a published compendium of an agency or trust’s anticipated spend over £2m in the coming months and years.
The move to outsource these functions comes while NHSE continues its efforts to slash its headcount from around 24,000 to around 15,000 as part of a major, ongoing restructure.
It is unclear how the cuts are falling on the commercial directorate versus other areas of NHSE, or what additional people the new commercial delivery partner will bring to the directorate.
The procurement is expected to start on 1 October with the contract starting a month later.
A billion-pound pipeline
The overall NHSE procurement pipeline includes 52 separate planned procurements or reprocurements worth at least £1.7bn, some already underway and one not expected to start until September 2025.
Most will go through the “digital data and technology” business area, with 35 entries in the pipeline accounting for at least £906m in spend – or 53 per cent of the total.
This dwarfs the two next largest areas of spend: “delivery”, with a minimum £363m spend, and primary care community services and strategy, at least £250m.
The former includes updates to national screening programmes, however it also includes the re-procurement of the public sector resourcing framework to be used to hire “interim labour, contractors and temps across NHSE”.
As a framework there will be no initial spend through it when set up – it will be a vehicle through which staffing can be arranged – but it is expected to see £250m spent based on historic spend levels.
The primary care spend is entirely made up of one procurement, the primary care support services contract. This is the next iteration of the vast deal to supply a large array of support and back-office services to primary care contractors, which was controversially first outsourced to Capita in 2015.
Most of the procurements will be made through procurement frameworks, or similar agreements called dynamic purchasing systems. As of July, when the pipeline was compiled, 35 out of the 52 planned procurements – comprising at least £1.1bn – will be made through these procurement instruments.
Meanwhile, just four procurements worth at least £106m will go through open tenders, whereby a buying organisation invites suppliers to bid for a prospective contract.
However, that figure may well rise. A further 13 procurements worth £513m are listed as “above threshold”, meaning the procurement is over the value threshold that procurement regulations say must be subject to additional transparency and scrutiny. These may be put through open tenders rather than through frameworks.
An NHS England spokesperson said: “While commercial resource is already in place in NHS England to support most business-as-usual requirements there will always be additional priorities or major programmes that arise which need commercial support, and the NHS ensures there is appropriate competition and value for money for taxpayers in doing this.”
Source: HSJ
Date: 20 September