Staff records for 75,000 Ministry of Justice employees have been transferred into a Cabinet Office-backed shared services centre as part of moves intended to cut back office costs across Whitehall.
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The Cabinet Office said full integration of MoJ staff details into the Shared Services Connected Limited (SSCL) scheme, would help unlock £300m of savings across government by 2024.
The development of the shared services centres since 2012 has been criticised by MPs the National Audit Office and trade unions due to delays and missed savings targets.
Two centres were established by then Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude to share functions including human resources, finance and payroll. SSCL is a joint venture between Sopra Steria (which owns 75%) and the Cabinet Office (25%), A second centre was created and run by customer service firm Arvato, but it is now run by the Department for Transport.
Launching the scheme, the Cabinet Office said it expected the programme to deliver £128m in savings a year, eventually rising to between £300m and £400m a year across government.
However, delays meant that auditors found they had only delivered £90m in efficiencies during their first two and a half years — at a cost of £94m in investment.
Cabinet Office minister Chris Skidmore insisted yesterday that full transfer of MoJ employee data into the SSCL IT system represented a key step in unlocking savings.
"We are addressing the challenges involved in cross-government business transformation and the programme is successfully delivering one of the biggest IT platforms for government in Europe with over 300,000 users," he stated.
However, a spokesman for the PCS trade union told CSW that shared services were failing because they were intended to cut money and staff, not improve services.
He stated that "vague announcements like this one" had not changed the union's view on the project.