The Cabinet Office does not have the mandate to deliver its strategy successfully. In 2025 the Cabinet Office introduced a two-tier board setup to bring together the clusters and the Cabinet Office central team, but this setup is still dependent on other boards and teams to enable delivery. The Cabinet Office acknowledges that numerous decisions that are crucial to delivery of the strategy, such as managing interdependencies or securing departments’ continued buy-in, are not managed effectively. In the case of the failed Applicant Tracking System (ATS), decisions were taken at an ‘ATS Board’ which sits outside the Shared Services Strategy’s governance structures and was unable to effectively manage the interdependencies that led to the programme being abandoned. Within the Strategy, key responsibilities for delivering shared services are spread across clusters, government central functions and departments, with no single person being in charge of co-ordinating and implementing the strategy. recommendation The Cabinet Office should appoint a single person to be in charge of delivering government shared services, with accountability and the required mandate for doing so. This appointee will be required to update the Committee annually on progress against delivery of the strategy.