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Consultancy spend in 2006-07

URN No: na

Consultancy spend in 2006-07

1. The Department categorises its spend on consultancy according to the OGC-led Professional Services Forum (PSF) agreed definition of 6 areas; management consultancy, IS/IT consultancy, financial consultancy, property services and estates consultancy, legal services and human resource advice and assistance, but excluding research by non-commercial bodies such as universities and economic and technical research.
   
   
2. In its continued efforts to drive down spend on consultancy and ensure value for money the Department introduced a new high level approvals process at the beginning of July 2006, which requires all proposed spend on consultancy with an estimated value of £50,000 or more to be subjected to scrutiny based on value for money for the Department as a whole. The process brings transparency of decision making and enables a view to be taken of the wider benefits to the Department of individual consultancy requirements.
   
   
3. In addition to collecting specific spend data on the six PSF consultancy categories and requiring spend to go through the new approval process, the Department also collects spend data on economic and technical research and requires it to comply with the same process.
   
   
4. The following table shows the Department’s spend on consultancy for 2006-07 classified under “Core Department” (this figure includes consultancy spend for the Small Business Service and the administration spend, on consultancy, for UKTI) and “Executive Agencies”, which consists of consultancy spend for Insolvency Service and National Weights and Measures Laboratory (NWML).