16th July 2026
The UK government continues not to have a grip on managing the strategy to pool back-office functions between Departments.
In a new report on the Government Shared Services strategy, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) highlights a string of issues with the scheme including unexplained delays and a lack of oversight, and warns that government must now urgently revisit all aspects of its strategy to avoid it becoming a costly failure.
The Cabinet Office claims that government’s Shared Services strategy, aimed at sharing corporate services across Departments including HR, finance, procurement and payroll, will deliver likely benefits of £4.3bn. This was scheduled to begin this month, but has been delayed for five months without explanation.
Other inconsistencies are highlighted in the report, such as a dashboard bringing together departmental delivery data which Cabinet Office cannot force Departments to use properly, limiting its usefulness; and a lack of formal commitment from HM Treasury and the Department for Education, undermining the strategy.
The PAC was further astounded that the Cabinet Office appears unable to clearly articulate the value for money case for its strategy – the £4.3bn figure cited in benefits does not reflect costs, with £1.15bn already committed to the project. In its current form, the PAC is concerned that the strategy will fail. Problems with the strategy’s delivery highlighted in the report include:
Overly complicated governance;
No clear ownership;
nconsistent departmental buy-in;
Delays in readying data; and
Poor management of interdependencies with other change programmes.
The Committee also questions professional services company Capita’s involvement with the strategy. The Cabinet Office has split all Departments into five clusters. One of these clusters (containing the DWP, the Home Office, the MoJ, Defra and their associated arms’-length bodies), the largest of them and accounting for almost half the civil service, has outsourced the provision of its back-office functions to Capita. The value-for-money case of doing this, relative to other in-house models in other clusters, has not been quantified by government.
Capita has performed poorly on a range of government contracts, including with the MoD for handling recruitment, with NHS England for supporting primary care services, and its ongoing poor performance managing the Civil Service Pension Scheme.
The Committee’s report calls for additional details about the contract that was awarded to Capita, including confirmation of whether the contract was awarded at 40% below the model of what it should have cost, and details on what has been done to provide assurance that Capita will deliver fully on its contract commitments under the Shared Services strategy.
Chair comment
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said: “The idea behind the Shared Services strategy is sound, and one that this Committee celebrates. It has long been evident that government departments, often islands unto themselves cut off from each other, need to work more effectively together – in short, to learn to share. Pooling back-office functions should be an easy win, and one which the Cabinet Office insists to our inquiry could save the taxpayer multiple billions. Unfortunately, there is no plan or timeline for achieving this, and little explanation of how government have arrived at the figures for the predicted savings.
“Unfortunately, our report shows this strategy plagued by the same exact problems it is trying to solve – division between departments, a lack of overall leadership, and overcomplicated systems. Capita’s involvement in the strategy, given their well-established poor record elsewhere, also does not give this Committee confidence in its successful delivery. In its current form, it seems set to fail, and Cabinet Office must provide us reassurance that this is something they understand and tackle, with the help of this report’s recommendations. The government should now carry out a realistic, hard-hitting review establishing whether this project is going to succeed, or whether it should be abandoned.”
Read the Government Shared Services report HERE