Industry news

Capita has increased its public sector revenue by 12 per cent compared to the last year – a surplus of £1.8bn. Moreover, Capita’s share of the public sector IT market has increased by one quarter since 2012.

The overall performance of the top 20 suppliers of software and services in the last year was very positive compared to previous years. These suppliers made a revenue of £10.7bn – an increase of 3 per cent compared to other years.

Despite the overall positive performance of the top 20 suppliers, there are still many challenges ahead. According to TechMarketView analysts, “there are changes on the horizon… there are still numerous large legacy ICT outsourcing contracts set to come to an end”.

In addition, the overall positive performance of the Top 20 IT suppliers displays a relationship improvement between the IT suppliers and the public sector - a sign of the healthiness of the sector.

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After weeks of intense negotiations, Simon Stevens, head of NHS England, has secured an extra £3.8bn in funding for the organisation next year. The sum will help the NHS in England to cope with growing financial pressures brought about by staff shortages, population ageing and growing health demands.

According to Simon Stevens, the extra funding is a precondition for the introduction of structural changes in the NHS in England anticipated in the organisation’s own “Five Year Forward View”. The latter sets out a strategy for the next five years of the organisation, which it claims can save the health service £22bn in efficiency gains by the end of Parliament.

The extra money will be included in George Osborne’s spending review due on Wednesday. It represents a front-loading of the £8.4bn the government has promised the organisation by 2021.

Treasury insiders have announced that part of the extra sum represents an injection of new money into the Department of Health’s budget. Nevertheless, Osborne is unlikely to be spared criticism as it is believed that other parts of the department such as Health Education England and the Care Quality Commission, the NHS care regulator, will be hit by tighter budgets.

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Related: Virgin Care to run child health services for the NHS in Wiltshire

The UK government will invest £178 billion in defence procurement over the next ten years – an additional £12 billion on top of the original defence budget.

This procurement plan includes a partnership with Boeing to supply nine new P8 maritime patrol aircrafts and two squadrons of Typhoon aircrafts, as well as the creation of two new strike brigades.

The decision to increase spend is thought to be in reaction to increased global threats over the past five years. The rise of ISIL, the crisis in Ukraine, cyber-attacks and the risk of pandemics are among the main reasons for the British government’s decision to launch this defence procurement process.

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Related: Controversial Hungary-Russia nuclear deal alarms EU due to tender process

Mitie, the British outsourcing services giant, announced on Monday that its first-half profits have been hit hard by cuts to local government budgets. In response to the sudden fall in profit, the company has been forced to cease some of its healthcare activities across the UK.

The company expects the unfavourable state of affairs to last for at least another year, after which its healthcare division is expected to return to profitability.

Ruby McGregor-Smith, Mitie’s CEO, says that new contracts awarded to Mitie should see the division “do very well” after the one-year critical period. During the first six months of 2015, the division incurred a £2.1m loss. Mitie’s healthcare revenue fell 19 per cent to £39m.

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Related: Mitie joins Serco and G4S in embracing government’s national wage hike

The governments of the UK and India have agreed to more than £9 billion in commercial deals as a result of Indian Prime Minister Modi’s visit.

These agreements will affect several different sectors, ranging from entertainment, education and healthcare to logistics, finance, energy and IT, with both governments seeking to strengthen the commercial bonds between their two respective nations.

A number of different organisations from the two countries – such as Aviva, Bupa, Standard Life, Merlin Entertainments, State Bank of India, Kloudpad Mobility Research and King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, among others – have also committed to participating in these deals.

The UK is currently the largest G20 investor in India, with India investing more in the UK than it does in the rest of the EU. One particular deal of note is the agreement between TVS Group and the Ministry of Defence which aims to save £500 million over 13 years through a renewed procurement strategy.

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Related: Understanding Indian Culture for Effective Business in 2015/16

Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, has awarded a Russian state-owned company with a €12.5bn nuclear power project.

This contract – a new attempt from the Hungarian Government to forge closer bonds with the Kremlin – includes the construction of two new reactors and the refurbishment of another two additional reactors.

This contract alarmed European Commission officials, who objected to the intergovernmental contract due to the lack of a transparent tender. This controversial contract puts the EU’s own dependence on Russian energy at stake, as well as the principles of the Euratom Treaty and the EU’s rules on public procurement.

The tender process is politically sensitive, with many EU countries seeking to reduce their dependence on Russian energy – a leverage tool thought by many to be used by the Kremlin in order to achieve their political and economic aims over recent years.

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G4S, the private security firm, has announced that the outsourcing of back-office services could save £1bn a year for financially strained police forces across England and Wales.

The amount disclosed is based on G4S’s own experience with back-office outsourcing, which has saved the company itself approximately £6m a year. According to John Shaw, managing director of G4S public services, the feat can be easily replicated by police forces within the UK.

In response to the announcement, Steve White from the Police Federation of England and Wales declared that changes made to the working structure of any UK police force should “not compromise public safety” and be reinvested back into the forces.

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Related: Civil servants shown how to guide on UK outsourcing

RAC Limited, the UK-based automotive services company, has signed a deal with Getronics for the provision of IT services. The deal will see RAC using Microsoft’s Azure as its cloud platform.

Getronics will also be in charge of running infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), as well as providing IT support for staff in three UK locations and other datacentre services.

The five-year deal is an extension of a contract signed in 2011 between the two companies for the development of RAC’s IT infrastructure. According to Steve Goodwin, CIO of RAC, “Getronics has delivered a highly agile solution which enables [them] to be nimble and flexible in what is a highly demanding, competitive and time-pressured industry.”

In an attempt to cut costs without sacrificing customer satisfaction, RAC uses automation in its service desk, as well as a cloud-based telephony and customer relationship management service. The company says that since the introduction of the latter in April 2015, customer satisfaction ratings have increased and the proportion of abandoned calls has been cut to less than three per cent.

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Related: Microsoft vies with Indian ITOs to provide India’s new goods and services tax network

Essex County Council has announced its aims to create a data share platform in order to improve its social, education, health and economic services.

The council seeks to engage with suppliers to develop a data hub and will launch a tender process in January 2016. It has announced plans to initially develop a prototype that will focus on families and households before extending the platform fully.

Beyond some of the initial platform requirements - such as the support of anonymisation and pseudonymisation of data, the possibility of sharing data, the support of predictive risk modelling and reports trough dashboards – the council wants to know whether suppliers can also provide a system to perform predictive modelling against certain behaviours.

Potential partners have until the end of the month to submit their proposals.

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Related: Westminster City Council selects Ricoh to aid digital transformation

Over the course of just one year, Sheffield City Council has achieved savings of £140,000 related to heating installations.

The savings were managed through a partnership between the council and Central Housing Investment Consortium, Procure Plus and Efficiency North on a £863,000 project, which involved the purchasing and instillation of heating systems across the city – over 400 in total.

This partnership allowed the council to refurbish an additional 70 properties without increasing its yearly budget. Janet Sharpe, director of housing at Sheffield City Council, said that this process allowed the council to find an alternative to the traditional market, where they previously had to choose between cost and quality.

In addition, this procurement process not only allowed Sheffield City Council to reduce costs and increase efficiency, but also included a new training process which will better equip council professionals when tackling similar matters in the future.

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Related: UK Government issues new procurement guidelines to help national steel production