Shared services

Status / emerging findings

• Three service centres now live and operational, employing over 7,000 staff and serving hundreds of thousands of civil servants; a fourth centre is also operational.
• Cabinet Office cannot enforce timely or accurate data returns from clusters; the monitoring dashboard is incomplete and of limited usefulness for tracking progress.
• Programme lacks single overall leadership or accountability—five decentralised clusters each have their own accounting officer, creating fragmented governance.
• Jerome Glass appointed as director general only recently; Rupert Lowe argued the structure mirrors historical failures like the £240 million abandoned ONS integrated data system.
• Cabinet Office witnesses defended progress since 2023, but faced withering criticism over governance failures and unclear departmental alignment.

Why it matters

A £1.15 billion government programme affecting civil service efficiency across all departments is operating with incomplete monitoring data and no single accountable leader—taxpayers need to know if this investment is working or heading toward the kind of collapse seen in previous government IT projects.

Tone arc

Opened as procedural review of progress; shifted sharply adversarial in May 2026 session after NAO identified persistent governance failures, with Rupert Lowe explicitly questioning whether the programme will waste billions more despite Cabinet Office defence of recent gains.

Key witnesses

Jerome Glass CB (newly appointed director general, shared services), Nathan Moores, Dianne Jeans, Marcus Mason, Rupert Lowe (Public Accounts Committee member, key questioner), HM Treasury (unnamed representative), Cabinet Office (unnamed representative)