Recommendation 29

Government lacks data on spend and the pipeline of supply and demand. Available estimates from third parties suggest that government spends at least £14 billion annually on digital procurement, but government has not been able to provide a more precise figure. There is also insufficient information about the pipeline of demand from departments for digital services.50 The Cabinet Office accepted that, until government gets better at collecting such data in order to analyse it, then there would be inefficiencies within procurement, which cost money. The Cabinet Office accepted that government could do much more to bring together a plan for formally assessing government’s digital procurement needs.51 The NAO report highlighted that GCF did not have demand data from departments and only had data from some suppliers on spend. GCF told us that it did not consider that it had a lack of data across government, but acknowledged that the challenge was to pull together the data it collected and to analyse it as quickly and effectively as it would like, which historically it had not been able to do.52