Summary

  • HM Treasury has committed £1.15 billion to government shared services since 2021. The National Audit Office recorded £459 million in costs incurred since 2020 and £1 billion in expected net lifetime benefits. Each figure measures a different thing.
  • Cabinet Office wants five cloud-based centres—Defence, Matrix, Overseas, Synergy and Unity—operating by 2028. NAO found no single central owner with clear powers to secure departments' commitment to join or a strong technical lead to align their ERP designs.
  • A central applicant-tracking programme was reset in October 2025 after clusters wanted recruitment functions in their own ERP systems. The revised programme is estimated to cost £26 million to £38 million. The next test is a named decision owner, funded onboarding plans and a design authority that can settle incompatible choices before they become live systems.

Five islands on one budget

The National Audit Office's March 2026 report describes a civil-service ambition that sounds mundane until an employee changes departments. Payroll, recruitment, purchasing and finance should run through five shared service centres, with common processes and comparable data. Instead of each department buying a separate platform, Cabinet Office's 2021 model grouped them into Defence, Matrix, Overseas, Synergy and Unity. Five centres were meant to be operating by 2028.

The money is already consequential. NAO records £1.15 billion of HM Treasury funding committed since 2021 and £459 million of delivery costs incurred since 2020. The programme expects £1 billion of net lifetime benefits. Those are a commitment, a cost tally and a forecast, respectively. None tells a civil servant whether a personnel record will move cleanly between two clusters tomorrow. That depends on decisions about fields, workflows, interfaces and who is allowed to settle a disagreement.

Sixteen departments intend to join. One hundred arm's-length bodies had a commitment, funding and a timeline in the NAO's key-facts count. Many other bodies have yet to enter the plans. Cabinet Office says joining a cluster is mandatory in practice; NAO found no central owner with the levers to secure departments' commitment. HM Treasury and the Department for Education both have modern ERP systems and sit in Matrix. They asked for clearer cost information before judging whether the move is feasible and good value. A central instruction that cannot answer the bill is a thin boarding pass.

The design authority has a chair, not a veto

Cabinet Office improved the meeting structure in autumn 2025. It created a Service and Technical Design Authority below a Shared Services Board. A portfolio dashboard gathers progress and dependency information. Yet the central team cannot compel timely, accurate monthly returns. NAO says other boards that affect the strategy have no clear remit over it. The machinery can describe the traffic; it cannot always stop a collision.

The collision is technical as well as political. Finance has a Common Chart of Accounts and has done more of the standardisation work. Commercial chose not to implement its functional standard. HR joined the design work but did not work towards implementing its standard. Clusters installed different functions within their ERP systems, and some processes are only partly implemented. NAO's consequence is plain: government may need extra interfaces and processes merely to make data from its five new centres agree. Buying the same class of software never made two payroll definitions identical.

The original report counts at least 25 other central digital programmes touching shared services; seven have medium or high impact. The applicant-tracking system is the most revealing. A central replacement for civil-service recruitment ran into clusters that preferred the recruitment modules in their own ERPs. Cabinet Office reset the programme in October 2025, narrowing the centre to a jobs board and pre-employment checks while each cluster deployed its own applicant tracker. The reset carries an estimated £26 million to £38 million cost. Overseas lacks that ERP function and, according to NAO, lacks the funding and capacity to build its own. One delayed decision became several design obligations.

NAO asks Cabinet Office to give director-general-level responsibility to onboarding and programme dependencies, agree plans for arm's-length bodies with each cluster by the end of 2026, strengthen the design authority and put technical judgement on a cross-government board. These are assignments of power and deadlines. The test will be the first departmental commitment made against a costed plan, the first incompatible ERP choice resolved centrally, and the first dashboard return whose accuracy someone can enforce. Until then the five islands have bridges on a drawing, and an empty chair where the crossing is decided.

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