Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what progress the Digital Commercial Centre of Excellence within her Department has made in improving the procurement of digital services, including cloud, since its establishment.

The Digital Commercial Centre of Excellence (DCCOE) is responsible for delivering on the digital procurement recommendations made by the National Audit Office and Public Accounts Committee respectively. Since the establishment of the DCCOE we have made positive progress in addressing those recommendations, including:

• The DCCOE has recently concluded the successful agreement of an End User Device (EUD) aggregation purchase that allows participating organisations to realise cost efficiencies of approximately 11% versus current procurement arrangements.
• On cloud specifically the DCCOE is leading on efforts to transform the way we procure cloud services, in line with commitments made in the Blueprint for Modern Digital Government to "negotiate whole-of-public-sector agreements and contracting once for a limited number of high value cases, including platform services such as cloud".