3.12 The Plan includes the Government's provisional estimate of £1.4 billion savings from the Strategy in the current spending review period 2011-12 to 2014-15. Figure 4 overleaf shows that:
• £790 million of savings can be made by government successfully delivering and taking-up four types of common ICT infrastructure; and
• £650 million of savings came from the ICT Moratorium in 2010, a process which resulted in government stopping or reducing its spending on projects involving ICT of over £1 million.
3.13 The only cost savings forecasted from the 19 delivery areas come from government moving to the new ICT infrastructure between 2011-12 and 2014-15. Teams are at a relatively early stage in benefits forecasting and not all projects are underpinned by a robust business case or a baseline. We have examined progress across these four projects in more detail in Part Four.
3.14 In the our report The Efficiency and Reform Group's role in improving public sector value for money,11 we identified a number of risks to accurately reporting savings which are also relevant to the savings estimated from the ICT Moratorium in the Strategy.
The risks are as follows:
• Cancelled projects involving ICT may include 'spend to save' schemes, unfunded proposals, or be replaced with other schemes.
• Where projects involving ICT have been de-scoped, savings may not take account of the costs of cancellation.
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Figure 4
Government's estimate of savings from the Strategy
Programmes | 2011-12 (£m) | 2012-13 (£m) | 2013-14 (£m) | 2014-15 (£m) | Total (£m) |
Common infrastructure1 |
|
|
|
| 790 |
Public Services Network | 30 | 100 | 130 | 130 | 390 |
Cloud Computing and Applications Store | - | 20 | 40 | 120 | 180 |
Data centres | - | 20 | 60 | 80 | 160 |
Desktops and devices | - | 10 | 20 | 30 | 60 |
ICT Moratorium2 | 130 | 290 | 130 | 100 | 650 |
Total | 160 | 440 | 380 | 460 | 1,440 |
NOTES
1 For the common infrastructure benefits the Cabinet Office collected estimates from each of the teams responsible for delivery and reviewed the data for reasonableness and certainty. It scaled down the forecasts from previous business cases. We have not validated the individual figures.
2 ICT Moratorium - these savings were either due to departments stopping their own projects or the Cabinet Office's review process which resulted in a change to the scope of a project in 2010. The Cabinet Office has made assumptions about how much of the cost of the project was due to ICT and when these costs would have arisen across the Spending Review period to 2014-15.
Source: The Cabinet Office Government ICT Strategy - Strategic Implementation Plan, October 2011
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3.15 We have separately identified that the forecasts for savings from 2012 onwards are low as the Government does not yet have a full list of ICT contracts that are due for renewal.
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11 Comptroller and Auditor General, The Efficiency and Reform Group's role in improving public sector value for money, Session 2010-11, HC 887, National Audit Office, 25 March 2011.