HP and Capgemini top government suppliers' earnings list - raking in more than £1bn a year each

Whitehall Monitor finds that government continues to splash cash with big IT suppliers despite promise to move to SMEs

HP and Capgemini have topped a government suppliers' earnings list of 2013, with each earning in excess of £1bn in the 12-month period.

The Whitehall Monitor was produced by public procurement data analysis provider Spend Network, and aimed to work out which private companies received the most government spend by looking at published transaction data. Its analysis is based on spend statements from 247 entities from central and local government, and around 38 million transactions were examined.

The top 20 suppliers from any industry included six IT suppliers, and HP is the largest single supplier to government with earnings in excess of £1.7bn in both 2012 and 2013. Outsourcing and IT consulting provider Capgemini was second on the list with earnings of about £1bn in both 2012 and 2013.

The report revealed that both HP and Capgemini relied heavily on one department for their central government revenue. HP relies on the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), while Capgemini relies on Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs (HMRC) - with 94 per cent of HP's government revenues coming from DWP in 2013, and 82 per cent of Capgemini's government revenues coming from HMRC last year. The DWP has since claimed that its figures do not match Spend Network's analysis.

This falls in line with a Freedom of Information response that Computing received from HMRC last August - which found that HMRC had spent over £3.75bn with Capgemini over a five-year period from 2008 to 2013.

The largest payment of £773.5m within those five years was in the last year of the period in 2012/13 - at a time when the government has pledged to reduce large public-sector contracts, and move to smaller, more agile deals with SMEs in accordance with the Open Standards Principles announced by Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude in June 2013.

The principles stated that a target of a quarter of all government procurement should involve SMEs by 2015.

But according to Spend Network there isn't enough data for it to "discern any obvious pattern of central government spend with SMEs".

"A lack of useful open data, particularly on indirect spend with SMEs further down the supply chain, makes it impossible to make direct comparisons with government figures, however valid they may be," the report reads.

The other four IT companies on Whitehall Monitor's list were Fujitsu, Atos, IBM and CSC. Telecoms giant BT was also on the list.

In total, the six IT companies received revenues of £4.6bn in 2012 and £4.2bn in 2013 - a nine per cent decrease.