Written evidence submitted by Aegis Defence Services Ltd (CSS0024)

1. Aegis Defence Services Limited is an awardee on Lot C of the CSSF Framework. Aegis now trades as GardaWorld, having been acquired last year. I was the CEO of Aegis. I have experience as a supplier both pre and post CSSF.

2. GardaWorld International Protective Services is the international security division of GardaWorld Security Corporation, the world's largest privately owned security company. Our services include static security, security consulting, risk analysis and reporting, crisis management and business continuity, mobile security, close protection, training and kidnap for ransom and extortion response. We were the first company certified to ISO 18788, the global standard for our industry and we hold six other relevant standards.[1]

3. GardaWorld is the incumbent security provider to FCO diplomatic posts in Baghdad, Mogadishu, Hargeisa, Tripoli and Sana’a. We are an awardee on the US DoS’s Worldwide Protective Security programme and currently provide the static guard force for a US Embassy in an extremely high threat environment. We support approximately 45 other governments and many international organisations in the Middle East and Africa.

4. In recognition of the collaborative intent of the Framework we formed a number of partnerships with other companies prior to award. We have worked hard to generate relationships with Lots A and B awardees to enable us to benefit from their CSSF security requirements and the full spectrum of opportunities.

5. Since inception we have bid on 3 projects under CSSF (LAF, MAO and Translators for Cyprus). We have yet to win any work.

6. I offer the following observations: Pre CSSF it was difficult to understand how to identify opportunities in this space. A number of sizeable projects appeared to have been awarded without a full competitive tender process. And then renewed and extended without coming to the market. Procurement appeared incoherent. Ex-Government employees moved easily into programmes with which they had previously been connected.

7. CSSF has regularised the procurement process. It is possible to identify a pipeline of opportunity, we are engaged and consulted at the pre RfP stage. We have benefited from a number of extremely well run supplier days. Procurement staff are more accessible. There is some scope to innovate, but those requiring the service are difficult to access and we would benefit from a forum to create new ideas.

8. We have engaged additional staff to focus on winning CSSF work. We have yet to secure a contract. Nonetheless, procurement staff have been extraordinarily helpful through the provision of detailed debriefs of our submissions.

9. So, I am a fan. We deal with many governments. Seen from our side, there are many areas of best practice in the UK’s process for procuring goods and services using CSSF. However, there is scope for improvement. Recently, we detected a marked reluctance by Post to bring a particular project to market for fear of a change in incumbent. The evaluation criteria were so weighted that it was nigh on impossible to unseat the incumbent who had held the contract for over three years. Many of our Lots A and B partners feel a similar bias towards incumbents. We have identified a tension between Government Departments in their approach to the Framework: DfID’s preference for niche providers with the SME agenda as their mantra versus the FCO’s inclusive approach to all competent providers; DfID’s generic and minimalist ITTs/RFP versus the FCO’s more detailed paperwork. We suspect that the CSSF Secretariat may still be struggling to bring stakeholder coherence to the CSSF process.

10. So what? We believe that UK Government has set-up a valuable procurement process which is under-performing due to an inability to discard legacy views and arrangements. This may be early teething problems or could it be a genetic disorder?

October 2016