Recommendation 4

Cabinet Office and HM Treasury have not ensured that functions have fully reported the efficiencies they achieve. Overall, government expects departments to make efficiency savings equivalent to 5% of their day-to-day budgets by 2024– 25, and each department has its own efficiency target. Currently, functions do not report all the savings they produce, and not all functions report their savings. There are no targets reported in the Government Efficiency Savings report Cabinet Office publishes, although they are set, for example, for the counter fraud function. Without clear targets for most functions there is little incentive for them to report more savings, particularly non-cash releasing savings, given the current focus within departments on the need to reducing their overall budgets. In 2023, GIAA noted that the amount of support the Cabinet Office could provide to the functions created a risk that efficiencies might be underreported. The Cabinet Office does not share examples of good practice between functions, although this would be welcomed by the functions themselves. By sharing successful approaches to calculating savings across a function, such as the case within the finance function, and between functions, other functions can be incentivised to achieve greater efficiency savings. Recommendation 4a: The Cabinet Office and HM Treasury should set out what the targets are that functions are working towards in the next functions’ savings exercise. b) Once the new targets have been set, the Cabinet Office and HM Treasury should work with all the functions to more robustly test the amount and scale of savings they report, and challenge functions to report wider savings where necessary.