Select committee: Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 9
27th Report - Government’s relationship with digital technology suppliers
Published 6 Jun 2025
Addressed to HM Treasury
Public Accounts Committee Government’s relationship with digital technology suppliers All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Recommendation (the committee's words)
To maximise the value obtained from digital procurements, departments need to ensure that digital people are sufficiently involved, as well as a range of project delivery, finance and legal teams. This entails more than just working collaboratively; it needs to address how digital expertise will have much greater input, accountability and responsibility.12 We asked how government was managing the relationship between digital and commercial teams within departments and ensuring that they were aligned and fully integrated with one another. GCF acknowledged that between 8 State of digital government review, page 35 9 Qq 20, 75 10 C&AG’s Report, para 10 11 Qq 8, 10–12; C&AG’s Report, Key facts 12 Q 6; C&AG’s Report, para 17 10 the commercial and digital functions, “sometimes there is a bit of tension there about the right way to do things and about different approaches”. DSIT acknowledged that part of its job was to “keep encouraging the whole of the commercial function to take this agenda really seriously, the same as we do on all sorts of aspects of this work across Government”.13 This seems to us that digital concepts are simply not well enough embedded in the GCF. Every time someone is recruited, they must have the right digital skills. Equally all 6,000 staff need to be trained so that they work closely with digital specialists to understand how to incorporate digital elements into new procurements.
From: Public Accounts Committee, 27th Report - Government’s relationship with digital technology suppliers (HC 640), 6 June 2025
Government response
Latest Treasury Minutes progress report to the Committee of Public Accounts on the Twenty-seventh Report of Session 2024-26
The government responded to the whole report on 4 June 2026 (deadline 6 August 2025).
Treasury minutes: Government response to the Committee of Public Accounts on the Twenty-seventh report from Session 2024-26
Published 18 September 2025.
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government states that it "agrees with the Committee's recommendation" on each of the recommendations in the report, with most carrying a target implementation date of December 2025.
- On roles and responsibilities, it says the Digital Commercial Centre of Excellence (DCCoE) has been launched as a joint Cabinet Office and DSIT team and is "working to formalise the roles and responsibilities" between digital and commercial teams.
- On skills, it sets a three-phased approach for the Government Commercial Function: a first phase by September 2025, a second by March 2026, and a final phase "to be confirmed".
- On the Digital, Data and Technology Playbook, it says a team is working with GDS "to launch a publication in December 2025", bringing it up to date with current practices.
- On spending data, it says the GCF Digital & Data Team "will set out the process" to use commercial insights from data held across government, with "further detail" to be provided to the Committee in December.