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The Cabinet Office recorded a £7,767,249 constructive loss in its 2025–26 accounts after deciding to end work on a centralized Civil Service applicant-tracking system (ATS). That is the accounting loss tied to stopping the central-system work—not the full cost of the programme reset, which the National Audit Office (NAO) says was estimated separately at £26 million to £38 million.
What does the £7.8 million write-off mean?
“Constructive loss” is the category used in the Cabinet Office accounts for the loss arising from the strategic decision to stop the centralized ATS work. The exact entry was £7,767,249, rounded in the report to £7.767 million. It should not be read as the total amount spent on the failed programme or as the complete bill for changing direction.
The wider reset estimate covers different costs and activities. The NAO reported that the Cabinet Office estimated reset costs of £26 million to £38 million, including contract exit, keeping the existing service running and ATS deployments within clusters’ enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The NAO also reported around £9 million in staffing costs for civil servants who worked on the central project before the reset; that figure was presented separately from the reset estimate. These are estimates, not a final audited outturn.
| Figure | What it represents |
|---|---|
| £7,767,249 | Constructive-loss entry in the Cabinet Office’s 2025–26 accounts for ending the central ATS work. |
| £26 million–£38 million | Cabinet Office estimate, reported by the NAO in 2026, of total reset costs, including exit, continuity and cluster deployments. |
| Around £9 million | NAO-reported estimate of civil-service staffing costs before the reset, shown separately from the reset estimate. |
The Cabinet Office’s 2025–26 annual report and accounts contains the loss entry. The report’s October 2026 correction slip concerned a different figure; the ATS passage was unchanged.
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Why did the Cabinet Office abandon the central ATS?
The ATS transformation programme began in January 2022. Its aim was to replace the existing centralized Civil Service Jobs recruitment platform with a new central system. The Cabinet Office expected departments to use the new platform and clusters—groups of departments working together on shared services—to connect it to their ERP systems. But, as the NAO later noted, use of the central ATS was never explicitly mandated.
Clusters raised practical concerns about the design and its fit with wider government plans:
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- Possible overlap: Clusters said a central ATS could duplicate benefits they expected from shared-services work, creating a risk of counting the same benefits twice.
- Extra integration work: Under the proposed arrangement, information would have to move manually from the central ATS into cluster ERPs, adding effort and cost.
- Timing: Some clusters needed ATS capability sooner than the planned central system could deliver it.
- Different system preference: Some clusters preferred ATS functionality inside their own ERP systems.
- No single overarching plan: The NAO identified a lack of one coherent government-wide approach connecting the ATS programme with the shared-services strategy.
Adoption was also uncertain. Cabinet Office officials believed departments would use the central platform, but the NAO found that the Treasury approved funding without assurance that departments or clusters would adopt it. A July 2024 letter from the Civil Service chief operating officer expected departments to use the system and said spending on duplicate platforms would not be approved; cluster concerns nevertheless remained.
What did the original business case promise?
The Cabinet Office’s original business case forecast £112 million in benefits from 2024–25 through 2031–32, against an expected programme cost of £41 million. That cost included an £18 million contract with an external company. After accounting for programme risks, the business case forecast £1.75 in benefits for each £1 spent.
Those figures were forecasts, not realized savings or returns. They also describe the original central-platform proposal, not the later reset. They cannot be compared with the £7,767,249 constructive-loss entry as if that entry represented the whole programme cost.
What changed under the reset?
In July 2024, HM Treasury approved the programme’s full business case, subject to central funding being secured. In October 2025, the Cabinet Office agreed a reset with clusters. The new approach keeps some services centrally—such as a central jobs board and pre-employment checks—but leaves each cluster to provide its own ATS as part of its ERP.
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While clusters develop their systems, the Cabinet Office began exploring ways to keep Civil Service Jobs operating. The NAO’s March 2026 report described continuity planning to 2030. That was a plan under exploration, not confirmation that the platform is guaranteed to operate until then. In October 2026, PublicTechnology reported that the Cabinet Office declined to confirm the exact current end date or provide the budget for ongoing work. The precise end date and current budget therefore remain unresolved in the cited reporting.
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What did the NAO say about value for money?
The NAO concluded that the Cabinet Office could have assessed the need for a reset earlier, given longstanding cluster objections and the history of weak adoption in other central programmes. It also found that time constraints made a thorough assessment of reset options difficult. Cost estimates omitted some costs, relied largely on cluster figures disputed by the central team and were not independently verified; the benefits of the options were not quantified.
On that basis, the NAO did not conclude that the reset was either good or poor value for money. Its finding was that the available information was insufficient to assess the question: “For this reason, there is insufficient information to assess whether the decision to reset the programme represents value for money.”
The audit also found governance shortcomings. The Cabinet Office could not provide a formal written record of the reset decision, and no accounting officer assessment had been published as of December 2025. The findings concern the evidence and decision-making available to the audit, not proof that one system model would ultimately have delivered better results.
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| Issue | Original central-platform plan | Reset approach |
|---|---|---|
| Adoption | Broad government use was expected, but not explicitly mandated and not assured by departments or clusters. | Clusters are responsible for providing ATS capability within their ERPs. |
| Integration | Clusters raised concern about manually transferring data from the central system into their ERPs. | ATS functionality is intended to sit within each cluster’s ERP; the NAO reported varying readiness to deploy it. |
| Timing | Some clusters said they needed an ATS sooner than the central system was planned to arrive. | Clusters develop their own systems while central Civil Service Jobs continuity options are explored. |
| Overlap and strategy | Clusters warned of duplicated benefits and a lack of alignment with shared-services plans. | The reset aligns ATS provision with the Shared Services for Government Strategy, while retaining some central services. |
| Cost and benefits | Business case forecast £112 million in benefits against £41 million in programme costs; forecast benefit-cost ratio was £1.75 per £1 spent. | Cabinet Office estimated reset costs of £26 million–£38 million; option benefits were not quantified in the assessment reviewed by the NAO. |
The NAO’s account of the programme and reset is in Update on government shared services, published in March 2026. PublicTechnology’s October 2026 report describes the unresolved platform date and ongoing-work budget.
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