When Nathan Moores set foot in a Public Accounts Committee (PAC) meeting at Portcullis House in January, he was, in his own words, “a little nervous”. It was the first PAC gig for the shared services strategy director at the Cabinet Office, during which the focus was on the shared services cluster strategy. Through five clusters, the ambitious plan is to bring 17 central government departments running unconnected ERP, HR and finance systems under one SaaS roof.

Shared services budgets and project progress were up for scrutiny once again by the PAC, and with good reason. Government department back-office operations cost around £500m a year to run. As the committee said, despite numerous attempts to reduce costs by implementing shared service strategies, “little progress has been made”.

It seems a tough one for Moores, the latest in a line of civil servants tasked with the shared services challenge. In December 2012, a Cabinet Office statement claimed that shared services would “save taxpayers up to half a billion a year”. And yet, in 2016, a PAC report said that rather than save money, shared services were actually costing the taxpayer an additional £4m.