Gareth Rhys Williams Reflects - Part 2

This is part 2 of my interview with Gareth Rhys Williams, the UK government Chief Commercial Officer (GCCO) for 8 years until this summer. Part 1 is here.? In this section, he talks principally about the way he reorganised central government procurement.

Organisation, structure and good practice

In his previous business career, Rhys Williams ran functions that cut across different divisions in large private sector organisations. But ‘Government wasn’t used to that functional language and approach’.? However, Rhys Williams introduced a new organisational model and structure, (the Government Commercial Organisation and Function) which has led to senior commercial people being paid for by Rhys Williams but managed in each Department.

?‘The people sit in their Departmental buildings, day-to-day tasks are entirely for the Department. I’m there to help with the bigger vendors, more strategic commercial issues, and supply the right people. It’s an inverted triangle, not a hierarchical model’.? But setting this up wasn’t easy – ‘changing employment contracts for senior staff was a nightmare’!?

But the change was delivered successfully and ‘it’s good that the commercial function has now really established itself. It’s joined-up, second only to finance I would say in profile, we’ve developed consistent methods, training, recruitment approaches, internal benchmarking, getting better and avoiding making the same mistakes. There are 180 public entities co-operating in development of commercial operating standards – how we do the work’.

Historically, public bodies beyond Whitehall have not always been positive about the Cabinet Office generally (the ‘darkest pit of hell’) or the procurement guidance or policies emanating from it. Remember for instance that half the local authorities at any moment in time are of a different political persuasion to the ruling party in Westminster.? Indeed, even other central government departments have not always welcomed procurement initiatives or organisations centred in Cabinet Office or Treasury!?

The top 1500 commercial staff are centrally employed, and deployed (‘rented’) to the Departments, which means they can move more easily between organisations, working to the same methodologies – ‘that really helped during Covid in terms of moving people to where they were needed’.? Other functions struggled with that and ‘that networked model really works well’.?

Central leadership does also mean that ‘at least once a year they have to talk to me’, he says. A ‘meaningful bonus’ also provides some motivation to act in a collaborative manner, ‘but we don’t tell the Department what to do’.? As he says, ‘we shouldn’t be judgemental about what they buy, but how you do it is interesting to us. Have you thought about the market, are you clear about your requirements, have you looked at what other Departments are doing and thought as a group about the supply chain, and so on. These are fair questions for the commercial function to ask. There can also be a co-ordination role where multiple organisations are buying similar products or services’.?

The major issue with this structure is it now looks like there are a lot of people (and cost) sitting in the centre. That’s not just true of the commercial function – the same applies to the Fast Stream recruitment programme, for instance, where the headcount sits in Cabinet Office.? So if there is a headcount cap in Cabinet Office, ‘it can get in the way of what would seem common sense in the private sector. If the MOD needs more buyers, for valid geo-political reasons, and is prepared to pay for that, we should be able to make that happen. But if the CFO in Cabinet Office says no, currently there is a problem’.? That wouldn’t happen in the corporate world, Rhys Williams points out.

But successes have outweighed any downsides.? ‘Pre Covid, we’d started best practice workshops, just two or three a year, and they attracted around 50 people. Now, they are practitioner-to -practitioner, led by different people from all around the network, and we get 500 people participating weekly. We have 28 metrics that measure commercial performance, and I suggest that an organisation identifies the five they most want to improve on, then make sure they send their people to those workshops at least. All the metrics have improved in recent years - savings, retention, training levels, contract delivery – I’d like to think this is not an accident. It’s about getting the right people, systems and methods in place. We’re in a very different place to where we started’.

I do believe Rhys Williams has played this restructuring initiative well. He has stressed that ‘this is not centralisation – it is a hub and spoke model, facilitated by the centre’. He calls it a ‘we the people’ set-up. You can work for your own organisation and also be a member of a cross-government professional function. ‘You work for the MOD perhaps, but you also work for the function and you can contribute more widely to overall continuous improvement’.?

His approach also contrasts somewhat with what I saw up-close under the previous regime with Minister Francis Maude and his CCO, Bill Crothers.? Rhys Williams is a much more collaborative, sympathetic character, whilst Maude and Crothers tended to be more directing, which was great when they were right, but not so good when they weren’t.? And the Maude track record was very mixed in terms of actual results (that is my view, not that of Rhys Williams, I should say).

(Part 3 and 4 next week)

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