7 Conclusions
94. Overall, departments appear to recognise
the importance of the DARs as a means of communicating their current
and future priorities and providing accountability against their
past performance. Accordingly, in selecting information to publish
in their DARs, departments have generally complied with Treasury
guidance.
95. Adherence to guidelines alone is not enough,
though. Information deficiencies remain, especially in terms
of relating expenditure to performance. For a report to be useful
to Parliament in its scrutiny role and to the public for general
reference, it must present full information in an easily accessible
manner.
96. While departments must strike a balance between
informing and overloading audiences, the primary focus must be
on ensuring that readers have sufficient information at their
disposal to assess departments' levels of performance, the associated
costs and the credibility of their claims about progress.
97. To this end, future DARs should include:
- Notes accompanying core financial tables to explain
trends and unusual movements;
- Direct linking of expenditure/resources to targets/outcomes,
both at objective level and in relation to individual initiatives;
- Comprehensive discussion of progress on efficiency
programmes, including explanation of where major savings are anticipated
and the likely impact on services;
- Full information regarding the quality of data
used in assessing targets, with limitations clearly set out;
- Consistently expressed assessments which follow
logically from the information provided;
- Details of any information which is outside of
measures described in PSA technical notes;
- Full commentary on past performance, with explanations
for failures to meet targets, and discussion of future initiatives
designed to improve performance; and
- Some form of reconciliation of current objectives
and targets, and of targets over time.
98. Given that several of these improvements
require departments to consider the amount of information they
should include and how better to present this, they might benefit
from reading across the range of DARs and borrowing ideas from
each other. Clearly the complexity of work areas and corresponding
objectives and targets varies from department to department, but
there are a number of identifiable occurrences of good practice
which can be universally adopted, including the use of well-designed
summary tables and the consistent and systematic approach to setting
out assessments.
99. To this end, we suggest that those select
committees publishing reports on this year's DARs make reference
to the findings in this report and draw departments' attention
to examples of best practice.
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