Mr Maude intends that a team of ‘crown representatives’ will enable government to act as a single customer so that a construction company, for example, will have a single contract for various jobs, rather than different contracts with each different department.
An initial list of 36 key suppliers has been drawn up, whose contracts will be centrally managed. These include Balfour Beatty, Carillion, Atkins and Amey as well as service providers ranging from Serco and Mitie to Microsoft and the Royal Mail.
The crown representatives will also be responsible for developing ‘emerging players’ to the market, ensuring best value through new competition for public contracts.
The government says that it saved £800m last year by renegotiating contracts with more than 50 suppliers.
Mr Maude said: “Our priority is to make sure the taxpaying public gets the best possible deal - and one of the ways of doing this is to ensure we’re really using the scale of government to push down prices. That is why any dealings with our big suppliers have to be coordinated and our approach has to be strategic – the new crown representatives will make sure this happens.”
He added: “We have already saved £800 million since May by starting to establish government as a single customer. But, in doing this we also recognised that we need better, more efficient relationships with suppliers over the long term.
"The value of a single representative, acting on behalf of all departments, became apparent during the contract renegotiations. It brought benefits for both sides - bringing a complete picture of a supplier’s portfolio of contracts to the discussions and able to identifying opportunities for synergy and cost removal.”
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