Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government, following the judgment in Consultant Connect Ltd v NHS Bath et al of 29 July 2022, what actions the integrated care boards who were defendants in that case have taken to ensure that members of the public and commercial suppliers have confidence in their procurement processes.

Each commissioning organisation involved in the procurement process produced their own lessons learnt report, and the decisions around the publication of lessons learned reports are for individual integrated care boards (ICBs). With reference to guidance and support to ICBs on procurement, NHS England published the Strategic framework for the NHS Commercial Sector on 28 November 2023, a copy of which is attached.

The framework aims to encourage regional collaboration between integrated care systems by creating regional collaborative commercial organisations. These will operate as group procurement organisations in providing the necessary system leadership, capability and capacity to deliver strategic commercial outcomes and supply chain efficiencies, and will be designed against a national blueprint to ensure consistency.

Every National Health Service provider will be expected to be a member of a collaborative organisation and a senior, experienced, qualified commercial leader will be appointed to run and promote each organisation at an executive-level, with ownership for commercial strategy and all non-pay spend.