Recommendation 4

By the end of the current Spending Review period a meaningfully higher percentage of digital and technology spend should come from departmental resource budgets, as opposed to capital budgets, in order to better reflect the reality of modern public service delivery. We suggest a target of 75%, up from an estimated 43–46% in 2021. GDS and the Treasury should be given explicit responsibilities for driving pursuit of this target across government 49 and for reporting annually on progress against it. We acknowledge that re-categorising such a significant amount of public spending would create operational and political difficulties, as a result of the different treatment of day-to-day and investment spending under the government’s fiscal rules; and that such changes would be highly challenging to deliver. Nevertheless, we believe that enabling better public service delivery is vital, and that such a change would help to do this. (Recommendation, Paragraph 18)