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Cross-government and public administration

The NAO's cross-government team reviews departments to examine how cost-effectively government as a whole manages its resources, the search for greater efficiency, and the delivery of major programmes and projects.

The team conducts value for money examinations of areas such as joint delivery, the delivery chain across departments, and the role of central departments in influencing cross-government practice.

Sharing knowledge and insight, we aim to help departments improve in common disciplines and challenges such as procurement, project management, financial management, and asset management.

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Advice, guidance and tools

In addition to formal reports to Parliament, we also produce a range of other outputs from our financial audit and VFM work. Examples include:

Departmental Overview: A summary of the NAO's work on the Cabinet Office 2010-2011

September 2011

This Departmental Overview is one of 17 we have produced covering our work on each major government department.

Departmental Overview 2010-2011

Auditing Behaviour Change

September 2011

This guide provides the NAO’s emerging thinking on what a value for money assessment of a behaviour change programme may focus on.

Auditing Behaviour Change
 

House of Commons Speaker's Committee report - Reports by the Comptroller and Auditor General

March 2010

This link opens a report on the pages of the House of Commons Speakers Committee.

Reports by the Comptroller and Auditor General

The Committee's report presents two pieces of work by the National Audit Office.

  • The Electoral Commission's spending to support the running of elections
  • The Local Government Boundary Commission for England: 2011-12 to 2015-16 corporate plan.

A framework for managing staff costs in a period of spending reduction

August 2010

This paper sets out a framework for effective management of staff costs in a  challenging environment of cost reduction in public services. It builds on the high level principles set out in the NAO’s short guide to structured cost reduction.

A framework for managing staff costs in a period of spending reduction

Testing CSR07 value for money savings

December 2009

During CSR07 the National Audit Office is carrying out detailed reviews of some 12 departments. These departments are responsible for delivering 98 per cent of the £35 billion target. Our reports, which will be published and laid before Parliament, will look at:

  • the department's governance arrangements, and
  • a sample of the savings reported in the department’s annual reports or autumn performance report.

The first two reports were published in December 2009:

Independent Reviews of reported CSR07 Value for Money savings

The National Audit Office has produced additional guidance for departments on the management of their VFM programmes and reporting savings.

We also report to Parliament on departments' financial management and on Departments’ systems for measuring performance against their Public Service Agreement targets (PSAs).

Testing CSR07 value for money savings

Consultancy Assessment Toolkit

The Consultancy Toolkit provides a framework for reviewing the extent to which an organisation is achieving value for money from its use of consultants. It is aimed at procurement or commercial teams, customers/buyers of consultants, or audit staff. It can be applied to the use of consultants department-wide, or at a project-level. It is designed to diagnose areas of weakness and raise awareness of where improvements can be made.

Accessibility note

The Consultancy Assessment Toolkit uses the Javascript scripting language to provide its interactive features and cookies to keep track of your answers. If you are using a browser that doesn't support Javascript and cookies or has them turned off it will not operate correctly.

We have produced an alternative to the interactive pages in the form of a PDF format printable document.