On the 11th February 2016 the Ministry of Defence (MOD) in a message to all staff working in Defence Business Services (the MODs corporate and personnel shared service function) announced that they ‘would bring in a contractor to act as our partner
in running DBS as a whole’ under a new contracting model called ‘Corporate Services Integration and
Innovation Provider’.
It would appear that the option of DBS being run by the public sector in the defence interest has been written off. Instead the MOD would rather throw good money after bad after not learning any lessons from its already well documented contracting failures.
The drive to privatise government shared services has resulted in bad decisions that have cost the public purse millions of pounds in undelivered savings, increased change costs and all at no risk to the private sector who continue to walk away with payments for outputs the civil service and public sector could have delivered, and delivered more.
Over the coming months we will be documenting evidence to back our position that corporate and shared service functions currently in the MOD should remain in the MOD if real value and security in delivering defence outputs is to be achieved.
