Civil Service Plan Reveals CCS And GDS Changes

The updated Civil Service Plan for 2014/15, published last week by the Civil Service, has revealed changes to the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) and the Government Digital Service (GDS).

The Plan claims it aims to introduce management skills that will allow the civil service to easily work with the private sector for procurement and collaboration.

To do this, the document targets CCS and GDS, claiming that sharing the experts in these Departments with other parts of government will help close skills gaps.

It also calls for external recruitment, apprentice schemes and reassigning skilled staff to core projects.

“Throughout 2014/15, Departments will continue to be able to borrow at short notice from the GDS ‘digital bench’ of capable digital specialists and draw on GDS specialist digital recruitment services,” says the Plan.

The report adds that the end of July 2014 will see the addition of 300 trained web editors that will support the migration of government agencies to the GOV.UK platform.

The document places a large focus on expanding the digital capabilities of the civil service, claiming this will increase confidence to build, operate and continually improve digital services for users.

“GDS are committed to continuing to work with Departments to extend the use of digital tools across government and to remove the technological and security barriers that are perceived to block their use in some Departments,” it claims.

CCS Set To Expand

Besides this, the Plan outlines the expansion of CCS so that is can provide wider end-to-end management services to the public sector.  

“We will continue to build the commercial capability within CCS as the government centre of expertise: by 2015, we expect it to comprise around 750 specialist commercial staff, a proportion of whom will be regularly refreshed using secondment, interchange and internal placement,” claims the Plan.

© 24N.biz