Stephen Kelly

2010, we spent 3.6 billion a year on consultants.

You know, people reading our watch, telling us the time.

Civil service, Stephen, is like an infinite wall.

Infinitely high, infinitely wide.

Every 10 billion pound we save is half a million junior nurses salaries for you.

is three million primary school places when you run in a business and the civil service is fundamentally a business needs to have a strategy a vision a plan and then you've got to execute the plan you want to have the best talent in the right swim lanes to deliver that what percentage of procurement that's government purchase of goods and services a went to British companies and B went to smaller companies and how did that change on your watch that's a great question so um

Government spends on public procurement 430 billion a year.

430 billion.

Yeah, and obviously very different times.

That was back in 2010, so 16 years ago.

And it was off the back of the credit crunch, 2008, and then a whole period of what was termed austerity.

But with this, effectively, I think fundamentally the civil service can be massively improved and made a lot more efficient so that we deliver much better services to citizens.

And that was the whole mission.

So between George Osborne and Francis Morton, David Cameron, they determined that they should bring someone in probably from the private sector

who's got a lot of operational experience and create a role called the first chief operating officer for the whole of the UK government, 24 departments.

And that encompasses all things like IT, commercial practices, procurement, digital services.

So the launch of things like GovUK, as well as major projects.

So all the fun and probably of connecting for health and HS2 and Hinkley Point and all these sort of things.

So it's a very wide range and anything touching taxpayer money

would be effectively the responsibility of this role, working very collaboratively with the departments.