Recommendation 21

In July 2023, the Treasury issued a framework for tracking, monitoring and overseeing efficiency savings. The framework provides definitions, guidance and best practice examples on how departments should calculate and report efficiency savings to the Treasury. The Treasury expects departments to adopt the Framework for reporting efficiency savings for the financial year 2023–24 and arm’s-length bodies to do so in 2024–25. This, however, will be different to the process for identifying and reporting efficiency savings achieved by the functions.28 We asked the Treasury what progress it had made in implementing the new framework. The Treasury told us that it had instructed departments that they must comply with the framework, but the real test would be when it started to ask departments for their reports using the new Framework in 2024.29 The Cabinet Office expected that the introduction of the Framework would make “the most enormous difference to the value of savings that we capture, and will enable reporting to a really good standard”.30 The Treasury told us that one of the main reasons for producing the Efficiency Framework was because it didn’t have “consistent, comparable, bottom-up information for every single department”. It explained that the Framework would allow it to stress-test and benchmark the savings being achieved between departments and between functions.31