Corporate Services
The Spend That Sits Across Every Department
Temporary staffing, occupational health, catering, records and payroll are bought across many departments, and each is a market in its own right. UK contract catering turnover was £7.857bn in 2024 on the Office for National Statistics classification for other food service activities, according to Verified Market Size. Leading contract caterers reported sales growth of 9.0% in the fourth quarter of 2025 and 10.5% in the first quarter of 2026, which covers participating operators, not every caterer. Optima Health forecasts a UK occupational health market of £1.4bn by 2028, growing about 4% a year, according to its annual report. That is a company forecast, not measured spend.
One Clean Budget LineEnglish local government is building a set of new organisations from a standing start. For a short period, the question that stops most public sector sales conversations has an answer. Working out what replaces that answer after vesting day is the commercial question worth sitting with now.Read the briefing
The Kitchen Changes HandsLocal government reorganisation will move school catering arrangements to new councils on a fixed date. It reopens an older question: who should run the kitchen, and on what evidence?Read the briefing
What our briefings cover
Workforce Solutions. Managed Service Providers (MSP) and Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO), agency and locum frameworks, executive search and Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks.
HR Services and Wellbeing. Occupational health, Employee Assistance Programmes (EAP), learning platforms, payroll bureaux, pension administration and salary sacrifice schemes.
Catering and Hospitality. Patient catering through cook-chill and cook-freeze systems, staff and retail catering, vending and events.
Documents and Office Operations. Records storage, scanning and digitisation, hybrid mail, print, stationery and certified secure destruction.
The commercial reality: many small decisions, one large cost
Dispersed buying makes cost hard to see. In the NHS, agency spend fell by nearly £1bn in 2024-25 from about £3bn the year before, yet the Recruitment and Employment Confederation argues that bank shifts can cost more than agency cover in some trusts. Records storage agreements carry retrieval and withdrawal terms, and retention periods vary with the record and its legal context. Catering economics depend on how food, labour and waste are shared between client and provider. Embedded staff and archived records make changing provider a project in its own right.
For this page our briefings look at the rules that shape each market: employment and off-payroll regulation, price caps and frameworks, and the pace of digital records. Consolidation is visible across the category. In workforce solutions, Korn Ferry agreed in June 2026 to acquire AMS, a London-based managed service provider and recruitment process outsourcing business, for about £850m, and completed the deal on 1 September, according to Staffing Industry Analysts. In catering, Sodexo announced its acquisition of Olive on 6 October 2026, according to FMUK. In documents, Restore Information Management acquired Bristol print and mail specialist MPS Marketing Services in a £2.3m deal in July 2026, according to Digital Printer. We follow what such combinations mean for choice at tender, how investors view outsourced services, and where changing demand affects value for money.
Last updated by Ajay Channana for Ipso Facto on 16 October 2026