Government has failed to meet its target of making £10m of efficiency savings.

Chief Minister Alfred Cannan announced at the Government Conference in September 2024 that a minimum of £10m savings and efficiencies would be made as part of a shake-up of the public service.

The target of a newly-created Operations Performance and Change Board was to deliver at least £50m of cashable savings over the next five years, starting with the delivery of £10m savings in 2025-26.

But giving evidence to the Public Accounts Committee, Mr Cannan admitted that just 60 days until the end of the programme’s first year, the target had not been met.

He revealed that only £2.5m of savings had been achieved so far - although other savings worth £14m has been identified.

He said: ‘Because of a couple of changes at the top this didn’t really get under way until April 2025. We will have done £2.5m by the end of March.

‘By the end of March, I think there is up to £14m pounds of savings that have been identified. But the challenge will be realising those.’

Chief officer Mark Lewin told the committee that ‘good progress’ had been made and the £2.5m in savings would have a recurring value of over £10m over five years.

He said that of the £14.6m identified savings, about £6m currently have been agreed, and that these will have a recurring value of over £30m if fully realised.

‘As to whether we will hit £10m realised by the end of the year, we still have that process to conclude but what we are seeing is that there is some great traction for this for many months, many years to come,’ he said.

Mr Cannan insisted that the change programme was not about reducing the structural deficit, which he said was very much a matter for the Treasury and the Budget.

He said the level of ambition had been tempered since the 2017 SAVE initiative.

SAVE had looked at delivering £25m savings a year by 2021 from ideas submitted by the public but in the event very few cost-cutting measures were realised.

‘I hope this will be a long-term legacy serious programme rather than a short-term administrative programme,’ Mr Cannan told the committee.

‘This programme is about how we deliver services, not what we deliver. We are not trying to challenge departments in what services they deliver.’

He said separately in last year’s Budget there were around £5m of non-pay savings and £3m of pay savings required by the Treasury.

‘This programme is designed to help them find that money but also deliver those services more efficiently,’ the Chief Minister said.

At the outset the £10m savings did not include health and social care.

Mr Cannan said the way Manx Care had been set up and was operating was a ‘source of frustration’, given that growth in public service staff numbers was often predominantly in the arm’s-length healthcare provider.