Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government what proportion of training under the new Civil Service learning and development contracts awarded to KPMG and EY they expect to be delivered by subcontractors; and what assessment they have made of the value for money of using contractors rather than procuring such expertise directly.

The Civil Service values its people, invests in their growth, and is serious about building the capability to meet the challenges of the future. This autumn the National School of Government and Public Services will formally open its doors to civil servants. The learning the school provides will boost public sector productivity and accelerate the pace of progress towards delivering the excellent, digitally-enabled public services to be expected from a modern state.

Many of the Civil Service’s training needs can be delivered in-house, by civil servants and the government is committed to reducing outsourced training contracts as we transition to an in-house delivery model through the new National School. In the meantime, we need to provide continuity of current provision of essential training and development for civil servants.

The new contracts include an explicit aspiration to source at least 51% of the total contract value, excluding service charges, through small and medium enterprises, whether directly or indirectly through the supply chain.

There are three core elements upon which the centralised contracts deliver value for money:

1. Economies of scale: we leverage the Civil Service’s collective buying power to deliver significant savings;

2. Consistency: we ensure that consistent quality standards are maintained across all training programmes and across the Civil Service; and

3. Efficiency: applying a "build once, use many times" approach prevents the costly fragmentation that occurs when individual departments procure training separately and manage individual contracts.

Individual or direct procurement of learning prior to the launch of National School would remove the benefits of economies of scale, resulting in duplication and lack of consistency across central government departments. It would also take a significant portion of commercial and business resources to manage individual procurements and contracts thereafter.