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 accounting entry is not the full cost of the programme or its reset: the National Audit Office (NAO) separately reported a Cabinet Office estimate of £26 million to £38 million for the wider reset.
What does the £7.8 million loss mean?
The £7,767,249 figure is the amount entered as a constructive loss in the Cabinet Office’s 2025–26 accounts after the strategic decision to stop the centralized ATS work. In plain terms, it is an accounting loss associated with ending that work—not a complete tally of everything spent on the original programme, nor the total cost of moving to a different approach. The annual report gives the figure as £7.767 million as well as £7,767,249. Cabinet Office 2025–26 annual report
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The NAO reported a separate estimate of £26 million to £38 million for total reset costs, covering contract exit, continued provision of the existing service and clusters’ ERP-based ATS deployments. The NAO also reported around £9 million in estimated staffing costs for civil servants who worked on the central project before the reset. These are distinct figures and cost concepts; the staffing estimate is presented separately from the reset range. The reset range is an estimate attributed to the Cabinet Office, not an audited final outturn. NAO, Update on government shared services
What was the Cabinet Office trying to build?
Launched in January 2022, the Applicant Tracking System transformation programme aimed to replace the existing centralized Civil Service Jobs recruitment platform with a new central platform. The plan expected departments to use the system and clusters—the groupings involved in shared government services—to integrate it with their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. But use of the proposed ATS was never explicitly mandated.
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The existing Civil Service Jobs contract was due to expire in May 2025. HM Treasury approved the programme’s full business case in July 2024, conditional on central funding being secured. The Cabinet Office’s business case forecast £112 million in benefits from 2024–25 through 2031–32 against an expected programme cost of £41 million, including an £18 million contract with an external company. After taking programme risks into account, the Cabinet Office estimated £1.75 in benefits per £1 spent.
Those were projections, not realized savings or a return demonstrated after implementation. The NAO reported the forecasts in its 2025 review. NAO, Update on government shared services
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Why was the centralized system abandoned?
In October 2025, the Cabinet Office and clusters agreed to reset the programme. The decision reflected practical objections to the central design and a broader shift toward aligning recruitment technology with the government’s shared-services strategy.
- Overlap with shared services: Clusters warned that a separate central ATS could duplicate benefits expected from shared-services work.
- Integration and data handling: The proposal would require data to be moved manually from the central system into cluster ERPs, adding work and cost.
- Timing: Clusters needed ATS capability sooner than the central platform was expected to be delivered.
- Different technology preferences: Some clusters preferred ATS functionality within their own ERP systems.
- Unclear government-wide approach: The NAO found that government lacked one overarching approach covering both ATS and shared services.
Adoption was also uncertain. Cabinet Office officials expected the central platform to be used across government, but the NAO says HM Treasury approved funding without assurance that departments or clusters would adopt it. A July 2024 letter from the Civil Service COO expected departments to use the central system and said spending on duplicate platforms would not be approved. That expectation did not remove clusters’ concerns or amount to an explicit mandate, according to the NAO. NAO, Update on government shared services
What does the reset change?
Under the reset, central provision would retain services such as a central jobs board and pre-employment checks, but would no longer include a central ATS. Each cluster would provide its own ATS as part of its ERP. The Cabinet Office also began exploring options to keep Civil Service Jobs operating while clusters developed their systems.
The NAO’s March 2026 report described continuity options to 2030 as being explored; it did not guarantee that the current platform would run until then. PublicTechnology reported in October 2026 that the Cabinet Office declined to confirm the precise current end date or provide the budget for ongoing work. The exact end date and current budget therefore remain unclear in the cited reporting. NAO, Update on government shared services PublicTechnology, October 2026
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Cluster readiness is not uniform. The NAO said clusters had varying readiness to deploy ATS capability through their ERPs and noted that the Overseas cluster lacked the funding and bandwidth to develop one. The NAO also said the original programme failed to meet its objective of replacing the existing centralized recruitment platform. It did not say that preserved software from the abandoned work will be reused.
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Did the NAO say the reset was value for money?
No. The NAO said the Cabinet Office did not assess the need for a reset as early as it could have, given longstanding cluster objections and previous weak adoption in other central programmes. Time constraints then made it difficult to assess reset options thoroughly.
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The NAO found that cost estimates left out 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. It also found governance gaps: 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.
“For this reason, there is insufficient information to assess whether the decision to reset the programme represents value for money.”
This is a finding that the available evidence was insufficient to judge value for money. It is not a definitive conclusion that the reset was either good or poor value.
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| Figure | What it refers to |
|---|---|
| £7,767,249 | Constructive loss recorded in the Cabinet Office’s 2025–26 accounts after the decision to end the centralized ATS work. |
| £41 million, including an £18 million contract | Expected cost of the original programme, as estimated by the Cabinet Office and reported by the NAO in 2025. |
| £112 million; £1.75 per £1 spent | Forecast benefits for 2024–25 to 2031–32 and forecast benefit-to-cost ratio in the original business case—not realized savings. |
| £26 million to £38 million | Cabinet Office estimate, reported by the NAO in 2026, of total reset costs; not a final audited outturn. |
| Around £9 million | NAO-reported estimate of civil-servant staffing costs for the central ATS project before the reset; shown separately from the reset estimate. |
The figures describe different periods and kinds of spending. In particular, the £7,767,249 accounts entry should not be compared with the original £41 million programme estimate as if it represented the full cost of the failed programme.
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