Public sector travel management

Public bodies mostly do not run their own travel tender. They call off a commercial agreement. That removes a procurement exercise and it does not remove the comparison — which is the part most often skipped, because a framework looks like it has done the work already.

The route to market: the current travel framework

The government’s travel management framework is RM6342, Travel, Transport, Accommodation and Venue Solutions. It is run by the body formerly called Crown Commercial Service: “Crown Commercial Service became Government Commercial Agency on 1 April 2026.” Its own description: “Access business and emergency travel services for the public and third sectors. Provides air, rail, and ferry travel, as well as accommodation and meeting venues in the UK and overseas.” and “Use this agreement for standard business travel or to support people under public sector care.”

An earlier version of this page described RM6016 as the current agreement. It is not: GCA records that “This agreement has a hard stop date of 26 February 2022.” Any guide, tender pack or supplier page still quoting RM6016 is describing an agreement that closed in 2022.

The four lots of RM6342

• Lot 1: UK and Overseas Booked Business Travel, Civilian Programmes & Emergency Response. “Use this lot if you need a single supplier to manage both standard travel and emergency responses.”
• Lot 2: UK Booked National and International Business Travel. “Use this lot for standard staff travel. It provides a UK-based booking system for national and international trips.” “This lot does not include venue hire for events or civilian crisis support.” Its listed tools include “travel tools: Access to 24/7 support, risk alerts, traveller tracking, and CO2 reporting to help you meet sustainability goals”.
• Lot 3: Venue Find and Supporting Services For Meetings, Conferences and Events.
• Lot 4: Accommodation and Venues For Approved Civilian Programmes. “This lot does not include business travel for staff.”

For ordinary staff travel, lot 2 is the one that matches; lot 1 adds civilian programmes and emergency response on top. Each lot lists “Expires: 30/09/2027”.

Direct award or further competition

“You can buy from this agreement in 2 ways: Direct award Further competition” GCA suggests direct award when “your needs are simple and included in the standard contract terms”, with one limit: “you can still talk to suppliers before awarding, but you cannot negotiate on price.” Further competition is for when “you have complex or additional service needs that are not included by the original terms of this agreement”. And for the single-supplier lots: “While lots 1 and 3 have only one supplier, you would still need to agree any extra service requirements with that sole supplier.” On carbon: “All suppliers have committed to comply with Procurement Policy Note 006” — see Carbon Reduction Plans.

Whether your organisation may or must use the agreement, and what your own procurement rules require, is a question for your procurement and legal functions and not for this site. With RM6342 ending in September 2027 and RM6408 due the same year, any call-off signed now should be checked for its own end date against both.

What a framework decides, and what it does not

The practical consequenceA further competition within the agreement is where the eleven criteria get applied. The free tender template downgrades cleanly for that: delete section 9 where the commercials are already framed and sections 3 to 8 are exactly the capability questions a further competition should be asking.

Two things that are genuinely different

Transparency is an external obligation

In a private organisation, travel reporting exists because finance wants it. In a public one it may be published, requested or examined. That changes the reporting requirement from a preference into a specification, and it makes the questions about data formats and retention — and about what you get back at the end of the contract — worth considerably more than they are elsewhere.

The rail share changes what good looks like

Where a public body’s travel is mostly domestic rail — check your own booking data — a booking tool that is excellent at air and adequate at rail is a worse fit than its overall capability suggests, and it is a difference that a generic evaluation will not surface because it scores the tool rather than the journey mix.

Worth testing directly: ask for a demonstration of a rail booking with a change and a refund, not a flight. Rail is the harder of the two to do well — the ticketing rules are more fragmented, split-ticketing and advance-purchase restrictions behave differently from fare classes, and a refund on a walk-up ticket is not a refund on an advance one. A supplier whose demonstration reaches instinctively for an air itinerary is telling you where its strength is.

What a further competition should ask that a framework has not

If the commercial terms are already framed by the agreement, the questions that are left are the ones that decide whether the arrangement will work, and they are exactly the ones a light-touch further competition tends to skip. Five that are worth the space:

1. Which servicing office, by name, and what are its hours? A framework establishes that a supplier exists at national scale. It does not tell you which team will pick up your calls or in which timezone they sit.
2. What is the out-of-hours arrangement, and what is the number? In-house or subcontracted, charged per call or included, able to see your policy or not. Ring it during the process.
3. Demonstrate a tracking report against a test itinerary. Not a screenshot. The duty under the 1974 Act is yours whether you bought through a framework or not, and public bodies are more likely than most to have to show how they discharged it.
4. What data do we get back at the end, in what format, within how many days? A framework sets a term. It does not usually settle what happens to your booking history on the last day of it, and that history is what makes your next further competition a real comparison.
5. Where is our data processed, and under what terms? Worth asking explicitly rather than assuming the framework has settled it for your particular data.

None of those are commercial questions, which is why a framework does not answer them and why a further competition run purely on price leaves them unanswered too.

One thing worth checking before anything else

Whether there is an incumbent arrangement, and what it says. Framework call-offs have end dates and notice provisions in the same way any other contract does, and the pattern that catches private organisations out — planning forwards from today rather than backwards from a notice date — is not a private sector phenomenon. If a call-off is running, find its end date and its notice mechanism before scheduling anything else. It is a five-minute task that changes the whole timetable, or confirms it.

What stays the same

• The notice date. If there is an incumbent, it is still the only fixed point. Work backwards from it.
• The VAT question. A supply under the Tour Operators Margin Scheme gives a business customer no recoverable input VAT, whatever route you bought through.
• The exit terms. Framework or not, the data you get back on the last day is whatever was agreed on the first.

For NHS bodies, staff driving their own cars are paid under Agenda for Change Section 17, whose rates changed in June 2026; how those rates compare with HMRC’s approved amount is on NHS mileage rates.

On the supplier side, central government contracts above £5 million a year ask bidders for a Carbon Reduction Plan that includes business travel; what that requires is on Carbon Reduction Plans under PPN 006.

Common questions