This is a House of Commons Committee report, with recommendations to government. The Government has two months to respond.
This is the full report, read the report summary.
Government spending and borrowing has reached record levels since the end of World War Two. As part of its response, government is aiming to become more efficient in its management of the public finances. Improving efficiency in government means being able to spend the same or less to achieve the same or better outcomes. This year’s Spending Review saw HM Treasury set resource and capital budgets for departments for the period 2022–23 to 2024–25—the first time it has set multi-year budgets since 2015. Ahead of the Spending Review, in April 2021 the Treasury asked government departments to set out where they might achieve efficiency savings of around 5%—a substantial amount. The Treasury worked with departments over the summer of 2021 to refine their plans. This follows a decade of previous efficiency drives, meaning departments are likely to have had to be more creative in how they attempt to improve efficiency. The multi-year component offers the chance to make plans which have more of a medium-term focus than a standard single year Spending Review.
1. The pandemic has demonstrated the importance of departments retaining sufficient capacity to respond to emergencies when identifying potential efficiencies. Existing workforce pressures in the health service created additional challenges for government’s pandemic response. There is a risk that upcoming efficiency plans will lead to similar problems in the future if they rely on reducing spare capacity. The Cabinet Office says it will be able to take a long-term view of efficiency plans through its new ‘Outcome Delivery Plans’ framework, which would allow departments to match resources to publicly defined outcomes. This could help identify where capacity may be needed. However, the framework is new and unproven, so resilience must be given specific consideration in efficiency plans. The Cabinet Office also says it will strengthen the cross-cutting risk function, aiming to establish risk management as a recognised profession across government to help respond to emerging risks. Beyond this, the challenges of EU exit and COVID-19 have shown the benefits of being able to redeploy resources across government, which helps avoid redundancy across the system whilst retaining some agility. However, it is currently unclear how these benefits will be embedded into government planning over the long term.
Recommendation: The Treasury and the Cabinet Office should set out what they have learnt from the COVID-19 pandemic about the relationship between perceived efficiency and dealing with unexpected events, and how this has been incorporated into the latest efficiency plans.
2. Past experience shows that attempts to improve efficiency can inadvertently reduce the quality of services or increase costs elsewhere – what this committee has called cost shunting. Efficiency plans without a clear idea of the implications for service users have led to problems in the past. For example, when the Ministry of Justice attempted to reduce demand for legal aid, there was a large increase in litigants in person which created extra costs elsewhere in the justice system. The collection of data around user behaviour is important when planning, implementing and running efficiency programmes in order to avoid future remedial changes with additional costs attached. However, as the Committee highlighted in its 2019 report Challenges in using data across government, government has not treated data as a valuable asset.
Recommendation: HM Treasury should ensure that, in their efficiency plans, departments consider what the potential impact might be on service users, and that data around user behaviour and sentiment is tracked as programmes are implemented.
3. Previous efficiency programmes have over-promised and under-delivered. ‘Optimism bias’ is a long-standing problem within government where project plans are impractical and unrealistic, and do not always achieve the expected objectives. We have seen this across a range of programmes, such as Shared Service Centres and, more recently, the Defence Equipment Plan 2020–2030. These problems occur due to poor data on costs and performance, but also because departments and central government do not consistently challenge existing plans. The Treasury and Cabinet Office told us that “test-and-learn pilots” gather programme data to give departments the flexibility to react when programmes do not meet their assumptions. However, government needs to be more agile in responding to these results: currently too few schemes are halting early enough after showing signs of poor progress. These issues could re-emerge if government prematurely over commits to efficiencies based on changes that have occurred during the pandemic which may not endure, such as reducing the government estate as a result of staff working from home.
Recommendation: HM Treasury need to ensure plans are subject to adequate challenge, testing the realism of departments’ expected savings, and considering the use of pilots where appropriate.
4. Skills shortages in the civil service could compromise departments’ ability to achieve efficiency savings. A lack of skills and leadership capability has caused delays, inefficiencies, and increased costs in several previous government projects. For example, the InterCity West Coast franchise competition saw a lack of leadership and expertise contribute to its collapse, and the Common Agricultural Policy Delivery Programme suffered from a high turnover of senior leaders. Increasing the capability to conduct successful efficiency programmes may require government to ‘spend to save’, putting upfront investment in place to increase departmental capability and capacity. There is also a risk that multiple efficiency programmes rely on the same pool of specialists within government functions, to the extent that the functions do not have the capacity to meet the demand. Increased government spending on consultants as a result of EU exit and COVID-19 may well have been less efficient than building capability within the civil service. We welcome that the Cabinet Office has begun to reduce spending on consultancy and intends to build capabilities within government, as set out in its Declaration on Government Reform.
Recommendations: HM Treasury needs to work with departments to understand the skills and capability required to deliver plans successfully, identifying any specialist and technical skills needed. The Cabinet Office should ensure, through its workforce planning, that there are enough resources and skills available to teams to deliver efficiency programmes and must write to us in six months on its progress in implementing the key measures within the Declaration on Government Reform.
5. Departments often struggle to track benefits as closely as they track costs. The Treasury holds departments to account much more vigorously for their programme expenditure than the benefits they deliver. In turn, departments are often much better at estimating, and tracking, costs than they are at tracking benefits. This can lead to cost shunting, where an apparent cost saving in one area has an unintended negative consequence elsewhere. The timely sharing of data between departments is essential in tracking the effects of efficiency programmes across government. However, the quality and availability of data continues to be an issue. For efficiency programmes to be successful, an effective performance management system needs to be in place. This will allow the reporting of progress against milestones and increase the collection of data relating to both costs and benefits. The Cabinet Office expects that use of the new Outcome Delivery Plans, which mandate the publication by departments of what is expected from programmes, will improve transparency and accountability. However, this has only recently been implemented and is still unproven.
Recommendation: The Cabinet Office and Treasury should work together to ensure that the new system of departmental Outcome Delivery Plans is able to track the costs and benefits of efficiency plans for government as a whole.
6. Government efficiency drives tend to be one-off events rather than being embedded as a continuous priority. The Treasury believes that well-defined, tight budgets provide departments with enough of a financial incentive to strive for efficiency continuously. But its emphasis on driving efficiency from departments primarily in the run up to Spending Reviews risks departments losing focus in between fiscal events and there is little evidence of a continuous improvement culture in government. Leadership behaviour that promotes a long-term view and encourages continuous improvement through a culture of openness and transparency that allows everyone to contribute must be properly incentivised.
Recommendation: HM Treasury and the Cabinet Office should work jointly from the centre of government to consider how best to instil a culture of continuous improvement across government that lasts beyond this Spending Review process.
1. On the basis of a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, we took evidence from HM Treasury (the Treasury) and the Cabinet Office on the government’s plans to increase its efficiency as part of the Spending Review.1
2. During a Spending Review, the Treasury allocates funding across the government’s priorities, sets limits on spending and defines the main outcomes that the public can expect government to achieve with its resources.2 Ahead of the next Spending Review, which is a multi-year spending round concluding on the 27th October 2021, the Treasury asked departments to make plans setting out where they might achieve efficiency savings worth 5% of their budgets by 2024–25.3 These efficiency savings are intended by government to help manage public expenditure as part of a post-pandemic recovery, with government borrowing in 2021 at its highest level since the end of World War Two.4 The multi-year aspect of the 2021 Spending Review is meant to help departments make plans with a longer term focus.5
3. The Cabinet Office is responsible for supporting the effective running of government and promoting efficiency and reform.6 It plays an important role in helping government realise its plans to improve efficiency, with responsibilities in areas such as civil service capability, improving transparency and project delivery. As such, the Cabinet Office will be involved with the planning, implementation and evaluation of departments’ efficiency plans across government.7
4. The Spending Review is an opportunity for the Treasury, the Cabinet Office and departments to establish how they will balance reducing running costs against maintaining the capacity to deal with emergencies or unexpected situations. The National Audit Office found that existing workforce issues added to the challenges in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, and that before the pandemic, under-resourced departments would react in an unplanned way to problems as they arose – rather than anticipating, planning and preparing for them.8 We asked how efficiency plans would make sure departments have resilience built-in and are able to deal with emergencies.9
5. The Cabinet Office told us that using its new planning framework, Outcome Delivery Plans, will require departments to line up resources against publicly defined outcomes, using clear metrics. These plans, as well as the multi-year Spending Review, are aimed at ensuring departments have sufficient resources over the medium and long term.10 Similarly, major programmes use ‘stage gates’ to make sure they have the resources they need to deliver against long-term plans. The Cabinet Office explained how the ability to redeploy specialist resources within government will help government adapt to unexpected events. It told us that experiences from recent years, notably EU exit and COVID-19, have shown the benefit of being able to move staff around different roles.11
6. The Cabinet Office told us that it thinks cross-cutting risk is a very important issue which has not been given enough attention in the past. It is now following the advice of the Boardman Review of Government Procurement in the COVID-19 pandemic by strengthening the cross-cutting risk function within government, which will provide quarterly reviews of risk across government.12 We questioned how it would make sure government will continue to monitor risks and ensure the resources are available to respond to them whilst minimising redundancy across the system.13 The Cabinet Office said that departments would learn from having to work with the cross-cutting risk function to identify risks each quarter, plan what steps they will take to mitigate them, and evaluate how likely they are to occur. The Cabinet Office believes that checking this process externally, and holding departments accountable, will ensure they take a risk-adjusted approach going forward. The Cabinet Office described how anticipating risk, carrying out preventative work and responding quickly allows government to respond to risk without having too much resource redundancy across the system.14
7. In the past, we have seen how departments failing to consider the full effects of their plans to improve efficiency have led to increased costs elsewhere in government, or have led to reductions in service quality which were costly to fix.15 For example, the National Audit Office found that the Ministry of Justice’s reforms to civil legal aid unexpectedly increased the number of ‘litigants in person’, which raised the cost of processing cases and led to more legal problems down the line, with estimated costs of £3 million per year to HM Courts & Tribunals Service (an agency of the Ministry) as well as direct costs to the Ministry of approximately £400,000.16 The National Audit Office has also reported on how reforms implemented by HM Revenue & Customs assumed customers would switch to online services, failing to account for what the users of its personal tax affairs service valued, and thereby causing a deterioration in performance measures that saw customer waiting times triple.17
8. We asked the Treasury how it will ensure efficiency plans consider the risk of ‘cost shunting’, where money saved in one area increases costs in another area, and whether it would be asking departments to identify where knock-on impacts could occur. The Treasury said that the Spending Review process will encourage different parts of government to come together and will require departments to have good understanding of where investment will be required and where benefits will be seen.18 The Treasury also said that guidance helps establish potential impacts across government. It highlighted the New Burdens Doctrine, which requires departments to set out any consequences of planned changes to local government in order to provide the resources needed, as an example.19 Additionally, we heard that the Treasury’s ‘Managing Public Money’ guidance sets out departmental Accounting Officers responsibility to constantly assess the impact of the delivery of savings, efficiencies and transformation programmes for the exchequer as a whole.20 We asked the Treasury whether these impact assessments should be made publicly available to the taxpayer, and whether it is confident that they are being done well enough. The Treasury agreed that they should be made visible to the taxpayer, but that it could not be certain impact assessments are done properly for every policy.21
9. We questioned the Treasury and the Cabinet Office on how departments are expected to estimate the impact of efficiency savings on service user behaviour, and how this is incorporated into plans for efficiency.22 The Treasury told us that it agreed with the National Audit Office’s recommendations that it should collectively assess the effects, behavioural impact and knock-on consequences of reforms, but stressed that these judgments can be inherently difficult. The Treasury expects departments to provide an initial assessment of the effects on service users, whilst their assessment of the likely impact of efficiency programmes are subject to further stress testing, including by experts in data, major projects or property. The Treasury also said it plans to learn from similar attempts at reforms in the past, such as the automation of services. The Treasury said it was hopeful the ‘Public Value Framework’, recommended by the Barber review, will improve departments’ ability to assess the initial impacts of reforms.23
10. ‘Optimism bias’ refers to the tendency for project appraisers to be impractical and unrealistic, which can lead to a failure to deliver, delays, poor service quality or a need for later funding injections.24 The prevalence of optimism bias in government has been highlighted before. For example, the Shared Service centres initiative fell far short of the planned savings and failed to achieve value for money and, more recently, we reported on the Ministry of Defence’s Equipment Plan for 2019–2029 including unrealistic expectations for £4.7 billion of efficiency savings, a figure for which it had no plans.25
11. We asked the Treasury and Cabinet Office what is being done to minimise optimism bias, particularly how they can ensure efficiency plans are subject to adequate challenge and properly evidenced.26 The Cabinet Office told us that government functions will help scrutinise efficiency plans, with experienced professionals able to assess project progress and provide challenge. Within the Major Projects Review Group, for example, the Treasury and Cabinet Office work weekly alongside the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) and functional experts to assess projects, which can help identify and minimise optimism bias as the business case develops.27 More generally, it told us the culture of accountability within government plays an important role in challenging optimism bias as it incentivises programme leaders to be honest about whether or not they think they can deliver with the resources planned. The Cabinet Office said continuing to test plans for their realism following their implementation is also important, as is learning from past experience.28
12. The Treasury told us that it is trying to prevent poor data leading to optimism bias by improving the raw financial data that government captures. It gave the new Online System for Central Reporting and Accounting (OSCAR 2) as an example of how government is capturing new and important datasets. The Treasury described how it is working with the government functions to collect benchmarking data, which can be used to sense check information. The Treasury noted how it would like to see more improvements to benchmarking data and more analytical insight driven by the functions to help make improvements in government.29 When we asked the Treasury whether departments should start programmes if they knew the data was not good enough, it told us that departments can use predictions based on historic data, which can be refined using small test-and-learn pilots, and then scaled-up if the new data proves the initial assumptions.30
13. We asked the Cabinet Office whether it had pushed back on any plans for reducing the size of government estates because they were over-optimistic. The Cabinet Office explained that the government’s plan to shrink the London property estate has not been progressing as quickly as it had wished due to expansion of departments in response to Brexit and COVID-19.31 The Cabinet Office said there are big opportunities for savings in London real estate but could not say to what extent these would be realised, as there is still uncertainty around the numbers of staff who may work from home or in offices across the United Kingdom.32
14. The Cabinet Office has overall responsibility for capability within the civil service and should ensure departments have the capability required to achieve planned efficiency programmes.33 Capability shortfalls have led to problems on numerous occasions, such as in the InterCity West Coast franchise competition in 2012, where a lack of expertise contributed to its collapse, and the Common Agricultural Policy delivery programme, which suffered from a high turnover of senior leaders.34
15. We questioned the Cabinet Office on how it can ensure capability is in place across government to deliver departments’ efficiency programmes. The Cabinet Office told us that processes such as the Outcome Delivery Plans, where outcomes are matched against resources, helps them identify where skill shortages are present.35 The Cabinet Office explained how its Declaration on Government Reform shows its commitment to build the capabilities within government; how it is particularly keen to increase the capability and capacity of digital and major project development skills within functions; and that it will continue investing in these areas.36 When we asked the Cabinet Office whether efficiency projects are often turned down as a result of insufficient capacity, it responded that it is more a case of conditional approvals—where projects move ahead if they show they can bring in the right staff or skills on time.
16. We asked the Cabinet Office how it can ensure that skills are situated in the right places across government. The Cabinet Office explained how the growth in cross-government functions has helped achieve this, as has the internal government job market, since it matches people with the right skills to the right jobs.37 The Cabinet Office also explained how the Infrastructure and Projects Authority is beginning to use specialists who can find the right people for the job on behalf of departments, and that it plans to do the same for the Digital, Data and Technology profession.38
17. We asked the Cabinet Office whether it intends to reduce departments’ spending on consultants, which has been high and increasing following Brexit and COVID-19. The Cabinet Office told us it has a strong programme to try and cut the external spend, and that departments should only use external staff when they offer unique skills which would not be efficient to have permanently within government.39 The Cabinet Office aims to develop skills and capability within government and make better use of the civil service’s knowledge and experience of difficult programmes.40 We asked the Cabinet Office how it would prevent any attempted efficiencies through reducing staff numbers merely leading to replacement with temporary staff or consultants. The Cabinet Office referred to controls to prevent this from happening, such as limits on the number of staff who can be employed in this way, controlling the money available, and controlling departments’ freedom to procure consultants externally.41
18. The National Audit Office’s report described how it is important that departments track the progress of efficiency plans, enabling timely intervention and providing assurance that the benefits promised are being realised.42 We questioned the Treasury and the Cabinet Office how it will track the progress of efficiency plans, including the extent to which they achieve their goals or have knock-on impacts.43 We were particularly interested in what processes were in place to monitor benefits realisation, and how they planned to mitigate the limitations of poor data when it comes to tracking progress.44 We also asked the Treasury for a detailed breakdown of which 2015 efficiency targets were met within the 2015 Spending Review period. The Treasury responded in writing that efficiency targets set at Spending Reviews cannot be tracked centrally, and that it is the responsibility of Accounting Officers to monitor and report on progress.45
19. The Treasury described how some of the processes used to scrutinise government plans, such as benchmarking and ongoing project reviews, enable the Treasury and Cabinet Office to monitor the progress of efficiency programmes over time.46 The Cabinet Office told us that quarterly reviews are held between the Cabinet Office, the Treasury and departments, to hold them to account for progress on programmes, and to look at what new issues they may have encountered.47 The Cabinet Office assured us that benefits realisation will be a strong theme in the Spending Review, and that departments will need to provide clear metrics to track the benefits of their plans, rather than just focusing on expected costs.48 The Cabinet Office told us that its Evaluation Task Force, which is made up of analysts, finance and digital experts, will help assess the performance of projects and scrutinise the results.49 The Cabinet Office intends the taskforce to be able to evaluate programmes more quickly, share learnings and provide quick correction, with its findings made public.50
20. We asked the Cabinet Office how it is going to deal with the constraints of inconsistent and poor-quality data and legacy systems in tracking the progress of efficiency plans, as described in the National Audit Office’s report.51 The Cabinet Office told us that these are huge issues for government, which will probably require multiple Spending Review cycles to properly address, and that it is making big investments in these areas as part of the upcoming Spending Review. For example, the Cabinet Office told us it is committing £600 million to upgrading legacy IT systems to bring data into modern digital exchangeable formats. The Cabinet Office also said that it will be investing in making it easier to share data between departments and are using the Declaration on Government Reform to encourage departments to have the confidence to be innovative with new technologies and data, which it says will be critical to achieving improvements in public services at a lower cost.52
21. The report by the National Audit Office emphasises the need for efficiency to remain a priority on an ongoing basis, rather than only being taken seriously at major fiscal events such as Spending Reviews.53 The report describes the need for system incentives to be in place, with leadership behaviour that encourages continuous improvement, and that continuous improvement should involve all levels of an organisation.54 We asked the Treasury and Cabinet Office how they will encourage government to embed efficiency as an ongoing process, and encourage departments to use continuous improvement.
22. The Treasury told us that the nature of the tight budgets in Spending Reviews forces departments to look within their budgets for improvements and savings, which it says will cause departments to constantly seek improvement.55 The Treasury said that strengthening the finance team in each department will make departments seek efficiencies more frequently. The Treasury suggested that if the finance function can have a bigger impact on departmental strategy and service delivery, then departments will unlock efficiencies year on year. The Cabinet Office added that government’s greater focus on service users, such as by using the Public Value Framework, will provide another incentive for continuous improvement since departments will need to respond to their experiences.56 We asked whether staff would be sufficiently incentivised to pursue efficiency plans which might put their own jobs at risk. The Treasury told us that it tries to encourage innovation and suggested that the prospect of career progress would be sufficient incentive for people to come forward with such ideas.57
Members present:
Dame Meg Hillier, in the Chair
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown
Peter Grant
Mr Richard Holden
Nick Smith
Draft Report (Efficiency in government), proposed by the Chair, brought up and read.
Ordered, That the draft Report be read a second time, paragraph by paragraph.
Paragraphs 1 to 22 read and agreed to.
Summary agreed to.
Introduction agreed to.
Conclusions and recommendations agreed to.
Resolved, That the Report be the Twenty-eighth of the Committee to the House.
Ordered, That the Chair make the Report to the House.
Ordered, That embargoed copies of the Report be made available, in accordance with the provisions of Standing Order No. 134.
Adjourned till Monday 29 November at 3:30pm
The following witnesses gave evidence. Transcripts can be viewed on the inquiry publications page of the Committee’s website.
Sir Tom Scholar, Permanent Secretary, HM Treasury; Cat Little, Director General Public Spending, HM Treasury; Alex Chisholm, Permanent Secretary, Cabinet OfficeQ1–111
The following written evidence was received and can be viewed on the inquiry publications page of the Committee’s website.
EIG numbers are generated by the evidence processing system and so may not be complete.
1 Kenjegaliev, Doctor Aman (Lecturer in Economics, University of Hull) (EIG0001)
All publications from the Committee are available on the publications page of the Committee’s website.
|
Number |
Title |
Reference |
|
1st |
Low emission cars |
HC 186 |
|
2nd |
BBC strategic financial management |
HC 187 |
|
3rd |
COVID-19: Support for children’s education |
HC 240 |
|
4th |
COVID-19: Local government finance |
HC 239 |
|
5th |
COVID-19: Government Support for Charities |
HC 250 |
|
6th |
Public Sector Pensions |
HC 289 |
|
7th |
Adult Social Care Markets |
HC 252 |
|
8th |
COVID 19: Culture Recovery Fund |
HC 340 |
|
9th |
Fraud and Error |
HC 253 |
|
10th |
Overview of the English rail system |
HC 170 |
|
11th |
Local auditor reporting on local government in England |
HC 171 |
|
12th |
COVID 19: Cost Tracker Update |
HC 173 |
|
13th |
Initial lessons from the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic |
HC 175 |
|
14th |
Windrush Compensation Scheme |
HC 174 |
|
15th |
DWP Employment support |
HC 177 |
|
16th |
Principles of effective regulation |
HC 176 |
|
17th |
High Speed 2: Progress at Summer 2021 |
HC 329 |
|
18th |
Government’s delivery through arm’s-length bodies |
HC 181 |
|
19th |
Protecting consumers from unsafe products |
HC 180 |
|
20th |
Optimising the defence estate |
HC 179 |
|
21st |
School Funding |
HC 183 |
|
22nd |
Improving the performance of major defence equipment contracts |
HC 185 |
|
23rd |
Test and Trace update |
HC 182 |
|
24th |
Crossrail: A progress update |
HC 184 |
|
25th |
The Department for Work and Pensions’ Accounts 2020–21 – Fraud and error in the benefits system |
HC 633 |
|
26th |
Lessons from Greensill Capital: accreditation to business support schemes |
HC 169 |
|
27th |
Green Homes Grant Voucher Scheme |
HC 635 |
|
1st Special Report |
Fifth Annual Report of the Chair of the Committee of Public Accounts |
HC 222 |
|
Number |
Title |
Reference |
|
1st |
Support for children with special educational needs and disabilities |
HC 85 |
|
2nd |
Defence Nuclear Infrastructure |
HC 86 |
|
3rd |
High Speed 2: Spring 2020 Update |
HC 84 |
|
4th |
EU Exit: Get ready for Brexit Campaign |
HC 131 |
|
5th |
University technical colleges |
HC 87 |
|
6th |
Excess votes 2018–19 |
HC 243 |
|
7th |
Gambling regulation: problem gambling and protecting vulnerable people |
HC 134 |
|
8th |
NHS capital expenditure and financial management |
HC 344 |
|
9th |
Water supply and demand management |
HC 378 |
|
10th |
Defence capability and the Equipment Plan |
HC 247 |
|
11th |
Local authority investment in commercial property |
HC 312 |
|
12th |
Management of tax reliefs |
HC 379 |
|
13th |
Whole of Government Response to COVID-19 |
HC 404 |
|
14th |
Readying the NHS and social care for the COVID-19 peak |
HC 405 |
|
15th |
Improving the prison estate |
HC 244 |
|
16th |
Progress in remediating dangerous cladding |
HC 406 |
|
17th |
Immigration enforcement |
HC 407 |
|
18th |
NHS nursing workforce |
HC 408 |
|
19th |
Restoration and renewal of the Palace of Westminster |
HC 549 |
|
20th |
Tackling the tax gap |
HC 650 |
|
21st |
Government support for UK exporters |
HC 679 |
|
22nd |
Digital transformation in the NHS |
HC 680 |
|
23rd |
Delivering carrier strike |
HC 684 |
|
24th |
Selecting towns for the Towns Fund |
HC 651 |
|
25th |
Asylum accommodation and support transformation programme |
HC 683 |
|
26th |
Department of Work and Pensions Accounts 2019–20 |
HC 681 |
|
27th |
Covid-19: Supply of ventilators |
HC 685 |
|
28th |
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’s management of the Magnox contract |
HC 653 |
|
29th |
Whitehall preparations for EU Exit |
HC 682 |
|
30th |
The production and distribution of cash |
HC 654 |
|
31st |
Starter Homes |
HC 88 |
|
32nd |
Specialist Skills in the civil service |
HC 686 |
|
33rd |
Covid-19: Bounce Back Loan Scheme |
HC 687 |
|
34th |
Covid-19: Support for jobs |
HC 920 |
|
35th |
Improving Broadband |
HC 688 |
|
36th |
HMRC performance 2019–20 |
HC 690 |
|
37th |
Whole of Government Accounts 2018–19 |
HC 655 |
|
38th |
Managing colleges’ financial sustainability |
HC 692 |
|
39th |
Lessons from major projects and programmes |
HC 694 |
|
40th |
Achieving government’s long-term environmental goals |
HC 927 |
|
41st |
COVID 19: the free school meals voucher scheme |
HC 689 |
|
42nd |
COVID-19: Government procurement and supply of Personal Protective Equipment |
HC 928 |
|
43rd |
COVID-19: Planning for a vaccine Part 1 |
HC 930 |
|
44th |
Excess Votes 2019–20 |
HC 1205 |
|
45th |
Managing flood risk |
HC 931 |
|
46th |
Achieving Net Zero |
HC 935 |
|
47th |
COVID-19: Test, track and trace (part 1) |
HC 932 |
|
48th |
Digital Services at the Border |
HC 936 |
|
49th |
COVID-19: housing people sleeping rough |
HC 934 |
|
50th |
Defence Equipment Plan 2020–2030 |
HC 693 |
|
51st |
Managing the expiry of PFI contracts |
HC 1114 |
|
52nd |
Key challenges facing the Ministry of Justice |
HC 1190 |
|
53rd |
Covid 19: supporting the vulnerable during lockdown |
HC 938 |
|
54th |
Improving single living accommodation for service personnel |
HC 940 |
|
55th |
Environmental tax measures |
HC 937 |
|
56th |
Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund |
HC 941 |
1 C&AG’s Report, Efficiency in government, Session 2021–22, HC 303, 14 July 2021
2 C&AG’s Report, para 2
3 Qq. 36, 37
4 C&AG’s Report, para 1, 2
5 Q 58
6 Cabinet Office: Declaration on Government Reform, Policy paper, 15 June 2021. FINAL_Declaration_on_Government_Reform.pdf (publishing.service.gov.uk)
7 C&AG’s Report, para 24
8 C&AG’s Report, para 8
9 Q 53
10 Qq. 53, 54
11 Q 54
12 Q 54, Boardman Review of Government COVID-19 Procurement final report (publishing.service.gov.uk) 8 December 2020, page 2
13 Qq. 55, 57
14 Q 57
15 C&AG’s Report, para 11 & 15
16 C&AG’s Report, para 17
17 C&AG’s Report, para 14
18 Q 60
19 Q 60
20 Q 61
21 Qq. 62–64
22 Q 65
23 Q65; C&AG’s Report, para 12
24 C&AG’s Report, para 18
25 Committee of Public Accounts, Tenth report of Session 2019–21, Defence capability and Equipment Plan, HC 247, conclusion 6; C&AG’s report, para 25, Figure 5.
26 Q 66
27 Q 66
28 Q 67
29 Q 68
30 Q 69
31 Q 78
32 Q 80
33 C&AG’s report, paragraph 24
34 Committee of Public Accounts, Thirty-first report of Session 2012–13, Department for Transport: Lessons from cancelling the InterCity West Coast franchise competition, HC 813, paragraphs 7, 14–16; C&AG’s report, para 25
35 Q 97
36 Qq. 92, 93, 95
37 Q 95
38 Q 99
39 Q 92
40 Qq. 92, 109
41 Q 106
42 C&AG’s report, para 28
43 Qq. 60, 77, 87, 89
44 Q 77, 87, 89
45 Letter from HM Treasury to Chair 28 September 2021
46 Qq. 43, 77
47 Qq. 77, 87
48 Q 77
49 Q 90
50 Qq. 89, 91
51 Q 89; C&AG’s report, para 29
52 Q 74, 89
53 C&AG’s report, para 33
54 C&AG’s report, para 35
55 Qq. 31, 100
56 Q 102
57 Q 101