3 June 2016 | James Richards

A project to merge the back-office functions of a number of Whitehall departments has “not achieved value for money”, says a National Audit Office report.

The government’s Next Generation Shared Services scheme has saved around £90 million over two-and-a-half years – substantially less than the £128 million originally forecast. Meanwhile, investment costs have reached £94 million.

In 2014, the Cabinet Office began the project to merge the five existing shared service centres into two independent centres to save money.

Eleven government departments including the Home Office, Ministry of Justice and the Department of Work and Pensions receive services from the shared centres.

But the National Audit Office has reported a raft of delays and inefficiencies across the programme, caused by a backlog of requests to change over to the new service centres and standardised operating systems.

It says there are 888 requests for change currently outstanding across the two independent centres.

Only two of 26 participating organisations that planned to switch to the single operating platforms have done so, with none doing so by deadline. The report found the average delay in migrating to single operating systems was 14 months.

The report blames “weaknesses in the design programme”, poor management of certain aspects, and a failure to secure buy-in from stakeholders.

Also, “several departments were unhappy not to have been sufficiently consulted on key elements”, including the appointment of one of the two private-sector providers, Steria, the other being arvato.