Recommendation 15

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