23 April 2004
The man wielding the axe over Whitehall showed his human side this week when he admitted he did not do everything he could have done to improve government procurement when he was the head of the Office of Government Commerce.
Sir Peter Gershon told MPs that he wished he had acted sooner in persuading departments to appoint a commercial director to promote procurement expertise.
'I freely admit that is one of the areas where we have not made as much progress as I would have liked when I started at the OGC,' he told the Public Accounts Committee on April 21. 'That was a failure by me to put a sufficiently convincing argument to persuade permanent secretaries to change.'
A National Audit Office report published last month found that of the 20 departments that spent most on procurement in 2002/03, only three had appointed commercial directors to manage relations with the private sector.
Gershon accepted the NAO report contained many valid criticisms. 'Of course there's a hell of a lot more to do. We never said everything could be solved in three or four years.'
He added that, despite the need to accelerate the collaborative procurement agenda, a lot of progress had been made since the establishment of the OGC in 2000.
But Gershon would not be drawn on what proportion of the expected £20bn of savings identified by his review would come from improved procurement, reminding MPs that he was taking in the whole public sector.
John Oughton, Gershon's successor as head of the OGC, dismissed suggestions that the office was too 'hands-off' in its approach.
PFapr2004
