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Since 2010, we have scrutinised the value for money secured from public spending against a backdrop of unprecedented austerity. Tighter spending plans have required not just a trimming of public services, but a full scale re-think about how services could best be delivered. Our focus has been to look at the way in which programmes and projects have been implemented to ensure they deliver value for money, regardless of our individual views on the underpinning policy.
We have also taken a strong interest in revenue collection, most notably tax avoidance. Partly as a consequence of our repeated focus on the subject, tax avoidance is no longer a niche topic of interest, but one that has rightly caught public and political attention. Our work on tax did not challenge the legitimacy of efficient tax planning, rather it brought into sharp focus the proliferation of a tax avoidance industry aimed at exploiting loopholes and complexity in our tax laws to deprive the Exchequer of much needed funds.
We challenged HM Revenue & Custom's (HMRC) overly relaxed approach to tackling aggressive tax avoidance and our attention helped secure a change in its approach to compliance activity. We demanded answers from multinational organisations, including Google, Starbucks and Amazon, who used our complicated tax laws to avoid paying tax on profits generated in the UK. We sought better transparency around tax reliefs, including Gift Aid, so Parliament could more readily identify those reliefs which were most susceptible to abuse. And we forged international links, particularly with the OECD, to help strengthen the UK's response on this important issue. Our work has led directly to a more vigorous response to avoidance from HMRC and we welcome the commitments from the Government and the Opposition to take stronger action on tax avoidance in the next Parliament.
In this Parliament, as a result of the Government's agenda to reform public services, we have seen a shift towards more varied delivery models involving more private and third sector providers, as well as more localised delivery, for example, with Clinical Commissioning Groups in health, and free schools and academies in education. These changes have required us to think carefully about the way accountability should work and whether the arrangements put in place for localised services are sufficient to protect public money. Whilst a consensus, particularly around transparency, has evolved with both the CBI and major private providers of public services, the Government has yet to adopt greater transparency to ensure proper accountability. For us as a committee, we have had to re-think how we could best follow the taxpayers' pound wherever it was spent.
We have examined many localised services, ranging from roads and flood defences to health and education. Departments have often resisted our calls for them to put in place stronger, more robust oversight when they have devolved funds to other organisations. Yet time and again we found instances where devolved accountability was not supported by increased clarity and transparency of performance and responsibility. We were pleased that the Government did concede the need for action in specific circumstances, for example, on the Durand Academy and Accident and Emergency services. We identified successes too, such as the Troubled Families programme, where close working by central and local bodies led to intelligent planning and effective delivery-this was a model of good accountability. However this debate will continue into the next Parliament, as the issue of proper accountability in a devolved framework still requires attention.
We uncovered the mostly uneven relationship between contractors and government, where contractors have used their greater commercial skills to negotiate advantageous terms, yet they have not been held properly accountable for their performance. At the same time, government has done little to transfer risk to private providers and when major programmes like FiReControl and National Programme for IT (NPfIT) have failed, the taxpayer has picked up the tab. We have examined instances where poor contracting oversight and low standards of integrity among providers has led to money being paid out where services have not been delivered.
We have maintained a strong focus on propriety, tackling head on concerns about the prevalence of off-payroll payments for public officials and excessive severance payments at the BBC. In the same vein we have championed the importance of whistleblowing as a window on what is happening on the ground. The need to ensure greater transparency and the importance of protecting whistleblowers have both consistently emerged as important issues.
We have developed new ways of holding the Executive to account on value for money. For instance we have carried out a number of landscape reviews to establish clarity against which we can judge performance. We have regularly evaluated the big Government reform programmes like Universal Credit, the Work Programme and the reforms to the Probation Service. We have returned to issues where we were concerned that performance remained poor, like Sellafield or the roll-out of superfast broadband in rural areas, or where we were concerned that our recommendations have not been accepted or implemented.
Our unique view of the value for money delivered across all government departments, covering an incredibly broad range of projects and programmes, has allowed us to identify systemic issues and challenges that came up time and again. We have been disappointed by the weaknesses at the centre of government and the lack of willingness to address these. Treasury and the Cabinet Office do not presently use their knowledge, experience and information to spread good practice and ensure that the lessons of past failures are heeded across government. There are thousands of talented and committed public servants but government still suffers from a lack of vital skills that are required to deliver projects and programmes in the 21st century. We have pushed hard to raise the level of commercial, financial, IT and project delivery skills across government. We championed the introduction of the Major Projects Authority and its Leadership Academy and view this as an intelligent and robust response to a systemic problem in government. We raised the bar for financial skills in government to ensure that projects, like those in the Ministry of Defence's major projects portfolio, were delivered by individuals with the expertise needed to calculate realistic costs and manage budgets. We have argued that individuals should stay in their jobs for longer so that they can see important projects through and we believe that accountability structures in Whitehall are not fit for purpose. There have been some improvements but not enough has yet been done to secure a culture change across the public sector.
Central to all our work has been a sustained focus on the outcomes delivered for the public. Too often we have found that public services have not been framed with the citizen at the centre of thinking, and too often those who lose out are the most vulnerable. This has ranged from concerns about the quality of medical assessments for benefit claimants, to the importance of effective delivery of broadband services for people in rural areas, to our work that led to the end of premium rate, telephone charges for millions of people using government call centres. Our recent work on the quality of care for people with learning disabilities was a classic case in point, where the flaws in system design and perverse financial incentives resulted in performance that officials accepted was totally indefensible. We were successful here in securing the commitment to close large mental health hospitals.
As this Parliament draws to a close we have summarised the key areas of our work over the past five years in this report. We have drawn out the areas where progress has been made and where our successors might wish to press in future. We recognise the commitment and achievements of those who work in public services and are conscious of the scale of their challenge in being expected to deliver ever more sophisticated public services with fewer resources and huge demographic pressures. Against this backdrop, making sure the interests of taxpayers and service users are protected has never been more important.
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