MPs warn Treasury delay threatens £1.15bn UK shared services plan

HM Treasury’s delay in joining a £1.15 billion UK government shared services programme has drawn a warning from Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, which said the move could make the wider strategy unworkable. The programme is meant to move 17 departments and 300 arm’s-length bodies onto shared finance and HR systems, with the Cabinet Office projecting £4.3 billion of benefits over 15 years.

The dispute centers on Matrix, one of five shared services clusters planned under the strategy launched in March 2021. Matrix is intended to use Workday’s cloud finance and HR software for a group of departments including the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, Cabinet Office, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Department for Business and Trade, Attorney General’s Office, Department for Education, Department of Health and Social Care, and HM Treasury.

HM Treasury currently runs Oracle Fusion SaaS for finance and HR. In a letter to the PAC last month, the department said it would not decide until December whether it was prepared to leave that system and join Matrix, even though it has funded the shared services strategy for five years.

The PAC said in a report published Wednesday that the Treasury’s stance sends a damaging signal across Whitehall. The committee said the Cabinet Office has treated participation in shared services as compulsory and believed HM Treasury and the Department for Education had initially committed to Matrix without conditions.

HM Treasury now says it can decide for itself whether to proceed, subject to its accounting officer’s assessment of further information from the Matrix cluster, according to the PAC. The committee also said the Department for Education’s formal commitment depends on more evidence on feasibility and value for money.

For technology suppliers and public-sector operators, the issue is less about which ERP platform wins a single department and more about whether the UK government can enforce a shared operating model across large departments with their own systems, budgets and accountability structures. The Cabinet Office’s business case depends on large departments moving together. The PAC said benefits attributed to Matrix rely on HM Treasury and the Department for Education taking part.

The numbers remain unsettled. HM Treasury has committed at least £1.15 billion to the overall strategy. The Cabinet Office has cited £4.3 billion in benefits over 15 years, calculated from its dashboard and cluster business cases, according to the PAC. The committee also said Cabinet Office cost estimates ranged from an £846 million spending review figure to around £1.6 billion.

The shared services programme is expected to affect about 470,000 civil servants. Departments had been due to start onboarding users to the cluster platforms between July 2026 and March 2029, but the start has been pushed back to December this year.

The PAC said the Cabinet Office must reassess the strategy and provide assurance that proceeding will not become a costly failure. If that assurance cannot be given, the committee said the government should consider stopping the project before more public money is spent.

The committee pointed to several risks beyond the Treasury’s position, including complicated governance, unclear ownership, inconsistent department support, delays in preparing data and weak management of dependencies with other government digital programmes. The Register reported that it has asked HM Treasury for comment.

This story draws on original reporting from The Register.