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.
HM Courts Service, the body responsible for the collection of fines, confiscation orders and penalties imposed by the judiciary and police, has been unable to provide proper accounting records supporting those fines, confiscation orders and penalties.
The Department for Transport started its preparations for the 2010 spending review early and took steps to improve and challenge the evidence on which it based its decisions with a view to securing value for money.
The Government has not in general measured the benefits delivered by its two central internet services Directgov and Business.gov, and the infrastructure service Government Gateway, which together cost some £90 million a year.
The Olympic Delivery Authority remains on course to deliver its work on the Olympic Park successfully. But almost all of the Public Sector Funding Package is likely to be required, with little scope for unforeseen costs to emerge in the eight months left.
HM Revenue and Customs will have to make sure its staff have the right skills if the Department is to succeed in cutting its running costs by 25 per cent by 2014-2015 and bringing in each year an extra £7 billion of tax revenue.