Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to implement the guidance set out by the Government Commercial Function in its paper entitled Exiting Major IT Contracts: Guidance for Departments, published in November 2017, in respect of (a) using market engagement, (b) setting up disaggregation work, (c) risk assessment, (d) developing a programme plan through the transition, (e) identifying the skills and capabilities that will be needed in the future and (f) any other work related to that guidance.

The Home Office is in the process of disaggregating its major IT contracts, and its work in this area provided a major contribution to the Government Commercial Function paper cited. Through disaggregation, we will be able to break up large, costly and cumbersome contracts and move to a more dynamic environment in which we procure standardised service components from the market while focusing on building strategic internal capabilities, such as around strategy, and architecture, and system design and integration. This will allow us to better manage our risk and control costs, also allows us to better use the pre-existing commercial frameworks and hence shorten our time to market and subsequent mobilisation, and allows us to more easily access the SME market.