Recommendation 25

We asked the Cabinet Office the extent to which it felt that government was “moving from a basic digital world to an evolved digital world” and whether addressing issues with digital procurement, at the speed needed, could help this transition. The Cabinet Office agreed that “procurement and commercial teams can be a catalyst in the change that we have to make”. It accepted that it needed to both recruit some different skills, and to “step up the skills and the training programmes that we have.” It recognised that this needed to be a comprehensive package, and committed to coming back to us on this with more detail.42 GCF acknowledged that government needed to do more to build digital commercial skills across the base “lifting that whole level and making sure that it is consistent across government and all departments”. GCF accepted that more could be done, but did not say what that would look like in practice. For example, we observed that when we asked GCF what more it was doing to upskill people in the commercial field, they did not instinctively mentioned going to the GDS team for advice, support or building relationships.43