A report from the pages of the House of Commons Speakers Committee. The Committee’s report presents two pieces of work by the National Audit Office covering the Electoral Commission and the Local Government Boundary Commission for England.
Our compliance checklist should help Departments and other bodies to assess where they have complied with and adhered to”Corporate Governance in Central Government Departments: Code of Good Practice 2011 (the Code)”, and to identify areas of non-compliance that need to be explained and described in their annual governance statement.
A major HMRC programme to improve the way it tackles evasion delivered £4.32 billion of additional tax yield, reduced staff numbers and improved compliance work. However the Department is not yet exploiting the full potential of its new systems.
Plans by CMEC to reduce its spending are based on uncertain estimates. There is a risk that additional cuts might be needed late on in the Spending Review which could have an adverse effect on services.
Equity investors have helped to deliver many public sector infrastructure projects via the Private Finance Initiative and have managed them in ways from which the public sector can learn. Against a background of limited information, evidence gathered by the National Audit Office raises concern that the public sector is paying more than it should for equity investment.
The Ministry of Defence, under pressure to make rapid financial savings, is significantly reducing the size of its workforce, by over 54,000 personnel. A report today by the National Audit Office has found that these reductions are happening in advance of the Department’s fully understanding how it will operate with significantly fewer staff.
The Department for Education has made progress against many of its objectives in delivering the free entitlement to early education, but it must address variations in take-up, quality of provision and the impact on attainment in later years if it is to achieve value for money.
Government departments have been successful in cutting costs and managing within their reduced spending allocations for 2010-11. However, most departments will need to cut their spending by much more over the next four years. This will not be possible without making fundamental changes.
Apprenticeships for adults offer a good return for the public money spent on them overall. However, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills could improve value for money significantly by targeting resources on areas where the greatest economic returns can be achieved.
The Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) has qualified his audit opinion on the 2010-11 Civil Superannuation accounts which report the financial results of the Principal Civil Service Pension Scheme (PCSPS) and a number of other small public sector pension schemes.
A programme to equip frontline police officers with mobile devices, such as BlackBerrys and personal data assistants, has achieved a basic level of benefits. However, as the benefits for most forces do not extend beyond this basic level, then value for money has not yet been achieved from the £80 million of expenditure.
HMRC’s renewed strategy for dealing with alcohol duty fraud is a significant improvement on the previous strategy. However, the Department needs a reliable estimate of the tax gaps for beer and wine; and to tackle successfully the illicit diversion of duty-unpaid alcohol back into the UK market.
The Department for Work and Pensions has introduced the Work Programme quickly, in just over a year, and this has had benefits, but the speed with which it was launched has also increased risks. The Department and providers have made assumptions about how many people the Programme will get back into work but there is a significant risk that they are over-optimistic.
Plans to reorganize central government will bring a range of functions closer to ministers, and the Cabinet Office and departments are on course to deliver cost reductions. However, departments do not have a good enough grasp of the one-off costs of the reorganisation or, secondly, of the ongoing costs of continuing to provide the transferred functions.
In 2011, the Financial Ombudsman Service invited the National Audit Office to conduct a review of the efficiency of its operations.
The Compact is a voluntary agreement that sets out shared principles for effective partnership working between the government and voluntary and civil society organisations in England.
The NAO commends the early progress being made by the Government in implementing its ICT Strategy but has identified areas where progress has not kept pace with the Government’s ambitions.
The Comptroller and Auditor General, has limited the scope of his audit opinion on the 2010-11 accounts of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).
Since 2005, when the Department of Health introduced its National Service Framework for Long-term Conditions, people with neurological conditions have had better access to health services; but key indicators of quality have worsened. The Department does not know what the Framework and additional spending of nearly 40 per cent have achieved.
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Skills Funding Agency are pursuing a range of initiatives to simplify funding, qualification and assurance systems in further education. However, they do not know the scale of the problem faced by further education colleges and other providers.