To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what recent assessment his Department made of the adequacy of the Shared Services Strategy to improve Whitehall efficiency.
Answered on
21 March 2023
The Strategy will create modern, user friendly and joined up back office systems across government. Breaking down red tape and freeing up civil servants to deliver for citizens. The new services and systems will be smarter, cheaper and faster, all at a lower cost to the tax payer.
Government departments and other bodies are clustering together into just five shared service centres. Current estimates suggest this could realise around £1.8 billion of benefits. Without the Strategy, costs may have nearly doubled by replacing systems in individual departments.
Clusters, with much greater buying power are now engaging with eager suppliers to procure cutting edge, expert systems and services. This avoids civil servants having to patch or develop one size fits all systems centrally for all departments.