Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 17
17
Accepted
Cabinet Office actively revising and standardising shared services benefits estimates for consistency.
Recommendation
The Cabinet Office told us that it is working with HM Treasury and all five clusters to revise and externally validate these estimates and obtain a benefits figure from the ‘Defence’ cluster. It said that it is working to ensure that costs and benefits are calculated on a consistent and comparable basis by all clusters, to strengthen their business cases for delivery.32 Part of this work includes examining the “non-cashable” benefits, such as resource management, productivity, and better reporting of financial data, to see if these benefits can be monetised in some way. The Cabinet Office expected this work to be completed about three months after our evidence session in January and said it would then update its “Case for Change” to include the latest data on costs and benefits.33 Monitoring progress
Government Response Summary
The government agrees and is actively developing a consistent, cross-strategy framework for identifying, defining, and monitoring benefits, in collaboration with Ernst & Young, to ensure consistent calculation and validation of estimates.
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.