Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 2
2
Accepted
Revisit and revise Cabinet Office 'Case for Change'; complete future business cases fully.
Conclusion
The Cabinet Office did not produce an overarching business case for the Shared Services Strategy, which has hindered progress. HM Treasury’s guidance to government departments states that a business case should be used to support all major programmes and projects considered by the Cabinet Office. The Cabinet Office did not follow this guidance and instead produced a “Case for Change” which lacked the requisite level of detail on costs, benefits and risk. The Cabinet Office says it did not produce a full business case as it believed that “time was of the essence” and it did not want to “put the cart before the horse”. That decision has had a knock-on impact on the level of funding received and on the level of buy- in from departments, because the lack of detail made the “Case for Change” less convincing. When reporting on the government’s shared services plans in 2016, we recommended that the Cabinet Office should produce a realistic and complete business case for its plans. The Cabinet Office accepted this recommendation at the time. Recommendation 2: The Cabinet Office should revisit its “Case for Change” and revise it in line with HM Treasury’s Guide to developing the project business case, reporting progress to us in its six-month update. In future, the Cabinet Office should always complete a business case for projects, programmes and strategies of this scale.
Government Response Summary
The government agrees and will develop a hybrid business case/updated case for change, incorporating key areas of a Green Book programme business case, which will be assured by the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA). It clarifies that a full business case was not appropriate for a de-centralised strategy.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. development was led at the cluster level. Practical implication of a full business case is a centrally delivered programme, which was avoided as having the clusters act as one would have meant that the ‘convoy’ would have only been moving at the rate of the slowest cluster. Additionally, the Strategy is not a centrally funded programme, there are five individual programmes of work seeking funding and approval to be considered on their own merit by HM Treasury and Cabinet Office. A full business case would have added an additional layer of bureaucracy and gone against government norms. Guidance on the use of business cases is set out in the Government Functional Standard 002; they apply to Programmes & Projects (as defined in the same standard) and the HMT Green Book. As outlined in Annex A of the Green Book, Strategy teams, and the Portfolios that manage programmes and projects do not normally have business cases, they are set budgets based on spending reviews and business planning processes. As part of this recommendation a hybrid business case/updated case for change will be developed. This takes the key areas of a green book programme business case, that are relevant, and embeds them in our case for change, to cover all areas whilst not confusing it with the cluster business cases. This will be assured by the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA). The National Audit Office (NAO) have agreed this is an acceptable approach.