Crown Commercial Service to procure £360m online benefits system

The government’s procurement agency, the Crown Commercial Service (CCS), has gone to market for a £360m cloud-based system to provide a range of employee benefits across UK government bodies.

Benefits covered by the system will include employee discounts, discounted gym memberships, technology and smartphone discounts, as well as cycle-to-work and childcare voucher schemes.

The three-year contract will also need to accommodate additional benefits and the personalisation of benefits by employees.

Delivered through a portal that will enable access through a range of devices, the security of employee data being processed by the system will be subject to the scrutiny of the CCS’s senior information risk officer.

According to the CCS’s notice, the plan is to position the new system as the main platform for employee benefits across central government departments, including those overseas.

The CCS has been working on changing public sector procurement and becoming easier to do business with. Niall Quinn, technology director at the agency, said this is a “turnaround job” to improve the CCS’s reputation within government and the supplier community.

Under Quinn, who joined the CCS in 2017, the new strategy is to make purchasing frameworks more intuitive, to push an agenda of supplier disaggregation, to bring more small and medium-sized enterprises on board, and to release innovation across the public sector.