Public Accounts Committee
14 May 2026
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Committee House of Commons
00:06 - 01:52
Speaker 1
Welcome to the Public Accounts Commission on Thursday, 05/14/2026. For over twenty years, the government has tried to cut costs by sharing departments digital platforms for back office operations such as finance, commerce, and HR. Whilst also reducing cost, these shared services can enhance decision making through standardized processes as well as improve consistency of the data. In March 2021, the cabinet office announced its shared services strategy with the aim of introducing five cloud based shared service centers. This strategy was allocated £1,150,000,000 in funding from HMT.
The committee last reported on the strategy in 2023 where we warned that the longer it takes for the government to get on top of the situation, the greater the impact will be on the ongoing cost to the taxpayer. So today, we will be looking to examine what progress the cabinet office has made with shared services since the committee last reported on the strategy in 2023 and to understand what the cabinet office is doing to ensure all departments formally commit to joining their assigned serve shared services cluster. We will also be exploring how the cabinet office plans to align the shared service strategy with other digital transformation programs and what it has learned from the failure of previous transformation programs. So today, we're very pleased to be joined with our team of witnesses. And Jerome, I'm gonna ask you please to introduce yourself and just tell us when you were appointed to your current role, and then we'll perhaps go to Nathan and Diane and Marcus, please.
If you could each all of you do the same.
01:53 - 02:14
Speaker 7
Thank you, chair. So and I'm I'm Jerome Glass. I'm the director general for future civil service in the cabinet office. I've been in post for I think I'm about to end my third or fourth week now. So, relatively new in Post, but I was previously the chief operating officer in the home office and so an active player in one of the main clusters.
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