Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 15
15
Accepted
Cabinet Office failed to quantify programme-wide shared services costs and benefits from outset.
Conclusion
The Cabinet Office’s original expectation was that the strategy would lead to savings of 10% to 15% in operating costs, based on what other large public and private sector organisations across the world had been able to achieve.26 It did not calculate specific programme-wide costs and benefits from the outset. Its benefits database included written descriptions of benefits but did not quantify savings.27 Instead, it adopted a bottom-up approach with cost and benefits figures developed as part of individual cluster business cases for their shared services plans.28
Government Response Summary
The government agrees with the committee's observation and is developing a comprehensive cross-strategy benefits picture, with a target date of September 2023. Work is ongoing with Ernst & Young to create a framework for consistent benefit identification, classification, and monitoring to ensure accountability and strategic alignment.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Target implementation date: September 2023 In Outline Business Cases clusters calculated benefits in different ways, this made comparisons between them tricky as they had been calculated over different timeframes, differing cashable and non-cashable benefits and different benefit categories. Work is being carried out at pace on developing a full cross-Strategy picture of benefits. There are 4 main objectives within this work: • Consistency: Ensure that benefits are identified and defined clearly and are aligned to strategic objectives. • Accountability: Ensure that cluster and programme areas take ownership of and are committed to the identified benefits and their realisation. • Strategic fit: Ensure that programme/project activity and outputs are aligned to support the delivery of benefits. • Monitor: Ensure that benefits are tracked and recorded, that accountability for delivery is clear, and achievements are reported and recognised. In order to facilitate this, work is ongoing with Ernst & Young (EY) to produce a framework to ensure common understanding and classification of benefits as well as investigating expected benefits across the Strategy and where to go further in the future. A draft report from EY has been produced, a detailed feedback exercise on the report is currently being carried out by the team.