Dame Chi Onwurah chairs the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. In October 2026 she asked the government a question that should have a straightforward answer: how much is Whitehall spending on digital transformation. The government’s written response admitted its financial systems cannot produce that figure at all.
“The government cannot provide a clear picture of how much is being spent on digital transformation,” Onwurah said when the committee published the response on 22 October. “It’s concerning that they cannot show where the money is going or how value for money is being measured.” Her verdict: “This must be addressed as a matter of urgency.”
The admission landed five months after the committee’s own report, Rewiring the state: Delivering digital government, set out what better visibility should look like. That June report recommended a target of 75% of digital spending funded through departmental resource budgets rather than capital budgets, up from an estimated 43 to 46% in 2021. It proposed that the Government Digital Service and the Treasury take explicit, named responsibility for hitting that target, reporting on progress every year against a performance framework GDS would have to publish first.
The government’s October response agreed to consider improvements, “over time.” It did not agree to appoint a Government Chief Digital Officer at permanent secretary level, the single accountable owner the committee wanted for exactly this kind of visibility gap. It also declined to name which departments and public bodies have not adopted basic data hygiene practices, the groundwork any spending framework would need to rest on.
A Governance Structure Cannot Report What It Cannot See
A supportive PMO exists to do one job before any delivery decision gets made: show the people with authority to act what is actually happening, in numbers they can trust. That reporting function is not decorative. It is the mechanism that lets a steering committee catch an overrun before it becomes unrecoverable, lets a sponsor compare one programme’s return against another’s, and lets a board ask a specific, answerable question about where money went.
Remove that function, and every layer of governance built on top of it is reporting on a picture it cannot actually see. Whitehall’s own select committee just demonstrated this at national scale. It is not that ministers are hiding the number. The government’s own position is that its financial systems were not built to produce it. A structure cannot be held accountable to a figure that structure itself cannot generate, and no amount of escalation, dashboarding or steering committee attendance changes that while the underlying number stays unavailable.
Visibility failures rarely announce themselves. Nobody in Whitehall woke up one day and decided spending should be untrackable. It accumulated, system by system, department by department, each decision locally sensible and collectively opaque, until a select committee had to ask the obvious question out loud before anyone could confirm the answer did not exist.
The Same Pattern Shows Up in Supplier Risk
The committee’s related finding on vendor concentration makes the same point from a different angle. It called reliance on a small number of suppliers, Palantir chief among them, an “unacceptable point of weakness” in public sector data handling, and recommended the government trigger the break clause in the £330 million NHS Federated Data Platform contract when it becomes available in 2027. The government has neither committed to nor ruled that out. A spending framework that cannot track its own cost is unlikely to have tracked supplier dependency any better, because both are the same discipline applied to different data: knowing what you have committed to, and to whom, before someone outside the organisation has to ask.
What a PMO Should Take From This
None of this requires a government department’s budget to test. Any PMO can ask itself the same question Onwurah put to Whitehall: if a board member asked for the total current spend across every active transformation initiative today, could that number be produced within a day, with a source for every pound in it. Few organisations answer yes immediately. Fewer still have a named owner accountable for making that answer better next quarter, the way the committee wanted GDS and the Treasury to be.