Select committee: Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 4
58th Report - Government services: Identifying costs
Published 12 Dec 2025
Addressed to HM Treasury
Public Accounts Committee Government services: Identifying costs and generating income All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Recommendation (the committee's words)
The lack of Single Service Owners with accountability for all aspects of an end-to-end service inhibits departments’ ability to identify the visibility of a service’s end-to-end cost and the incentive to reduce it. The absence of Single Service Owners (SSOs) with the right mandate and visibility prevents a full view of end-to-end service costs and weakens incentives to reduce them, as focus remains on individual components rather than the whole process. Achieving larger benefits requires deeper service understanding and, in some cases, re-engineering of those services. The SSO role is not well understood across departments compared to other senior roles, and more can be done to raise its profile. There is an opportunity to build on the existing community of Service Owners and the methodology from the Top 75 programme, which included industry benchmarks for segmented digital services. Permanent Secretaries should be responsible for appointing SSOs with appropriate skills and talent, though the Cabinet Office has not set a timeframe for this. recommendation a. The Cabinet Office should, within the next six months, require Permanent Secretaries to appoint Senior Single Service Owners for all remaining services identified by the Cabinet Office and the Government Digital Service which do not yet have one in place. b. The Cabinet Office should set out a deadline by which Permanent Secretaries must complete the identification and appointment of SSOs for their remaining services. 5
From: Public Accounts Committee, 58th Report - Government services: Identifying costs (HC 1421), 12 December 2025
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 1 April 2026 (deadline 12 February 2026).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government agrees with the Committee's recommendations on cost ownership, costing guidance, single service owners and data leadership, and disagrees with one on prioritising legacy systems for further investigation.
- On accountability for costs, the government agrees and sets a target date of July 2026: the Treasury will issue an updated Dear Accounting Officer letter setting expectations that senior leaders identify, use and improve service-level cost information.
- On the six-month request to prioritise legacy systems for investigation, the government disagrees, stating it "does not agree that this recommendation should be an immediate priority of the next 6 months" given work already in progress.
- On the baselined list of legacy systems, the government agrees and will share "the available data" with the Committee chair by March 2026, but does not intend to make the list publicly available because of cyber-attack concerns.
- On Senior Service Owners, the government agrees with a target of March 2027: it will issue a letter encouraging Permanent Secretaries to assess gaps within 6 months and appoint SSOs within 12 months, with the timescale "accelerated if possible".