Recommendation 27

As part of the key principles for claiming efficiency savings, efficiencies should be carefully calculated, evidence and reported. In doing so, savings should not be double- counted and should not be reported again in future initiatives.41 We asked what witnesses were doing to ensure that savings weren’t being double counted, and whether having one process for identifying and reporting functional savings, and a different process for identifying and reporting departmental savings, created a danger that there would be two bureaucracies both working towards the same aim. The Cabinet Office told us that double- counting was checked as part of the GIAA’s review, which looked at the methodologies used to ensure that savings were not being counted in other places. It recognised, however, that with the implementation of the new Efficiency Framework, there was “perhaps more risk that a commercial saving is counted by the Cabinet Office central team and in the departmental team, because the departmental team is doing more rigorous reporting of efficiency”.42 It explained that it had highlighted this as a risk, and that it would manage this as part of implementing the new framework, but that it thought that it was a “small price to pay for the overall increase in focus and reporting on efficiency”. The Treasury similarly explained that there will be a potential for overlap and inconsistency, and that this would be part of the work it would need to undertake with its auditors to make sure that it was “doing everything we can to clean the data and get consistency over time”.43