Recommendation 18

The Cabinet Office’s ‘blueprint’ exercise in 2018 set consistent expectations for functions and introduced more regularised reporting from functions on their performance, costs and benefits.32 The National Audit Office noted that data quality would be central to the success of these reporting initiatives but found cross-departmental data to be poor.33 We asked the Cabinet Office whether it agreed with the National Audit Office’s assessment that data on impacts was poor. The Cabinet Office told us it had a long way to go in this area before costs and benefits data is robust enough to support the value of the functions.34 It noted specific difficulties in measuring impact in functions such as HR which, unlike the Commercial function, does not have clear savings figures associated with it.