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 AI-generated
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.
Summary of the government's response below — read the verbatim text to verify.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government · verbatim extract
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.
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