MPs on parliament's public accounts committee chose the first day back after the referendum result to take a detailed look at the government's shared service centre programme, the subject of a fairly critical recent report by the National Audit Office.
The NAO's report found that the Next Generation Shared Services strategy, government's high-profile 2014 bid to transfer back-office functions to two shared service centres working across departments, had not "achieved the significant anticipated savings and benefits" originally promised.
While the spending watchdog found that the two centres had delivered £90m of overall savings, it pointed out that this was some way off the £128m a year originally forecast, and flagged "delays in designing, building and testing the systems", which meant only two of 26 planned departments and agencies had signed up to the single operating platform by the time of its report. Meanwhile, the watchdog found that four customers had quit their shared services contracts.
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