Red Dragon – a project by the Ministry of Defence (MOD), Welsh Assembly Government and the then Welsh Development Agency (the Welsh Authorities) to provide modern aviation repair facilities at St Athan, South Wales – has cost the taxpayer around £113 million, although it was meant to have saved MOD money and protected jobs in […]
Government faces increasing pressure to do more with fewer financial resources and, with challenges such as climate change and an ageing population, will require innovation in public services. Since 2006, when the National Audit Office last reported to Parliament on innovation in central government, departments have started to implement some of the report’s recommendations and […]
An initiative, begun in 2004, by the National Offender Management Service to build a single offender management IT system for the prison and probation services has not delivered value for money. A National Audit Office investigation found the project had been hampered by poor management leading to a three-year delay, a doubling in project costs […]
The majority of carers who receive benefits from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) are satisfied with the support they receive, worth up to £2 billion a year. The Department is delivering carers’ benefits effectively and has made improvements in processing claims in the last few years. But at least a fifth have difficulties […]
The NAO review looked at what the BBC is doing to maximise the efficiency of radio production across its Network and Nations radio stations, focusing on the use of cost comparisons for similar programme types within the BBC stations and with commercial competitors, the BBC’s efficiency plans and the BBC’s assessment of the impact of efficiency initiatives on performance.
The Department of Energy and Climate Change’s Warm Front Scheme to tackle fuel poverty in England helped to improve the energy efficiency of over 635,000 households between June 2005 and March 2008. According to a report by the National Audit Office there were, however, 1.9 million vulnerable households in 2006, so this rate of progress […]
Government is committed to conducting formal impact assessments of the need for and likely impact of new regulations. A National Audit Office report has found that scrutiny of proposed legislation is strengthening and that the standard is better than it was, but one fifth of assessments still did not include any quantified data to assess […]
According to a National Audit Office report, the NHS has successfully transferred 1.1 million NHS employees on to a new simplified pay system. Given the scale of the NHS this was a substantial task which the NHS, in partnership with the trade unions, achieved in a short timescale. There are some examples of NHS trusts […]
HMRC has improved how it manages debts owed to it by taxpayers, according to a report by the National Audit Office. The amount of money owed has reduced from 4.3 per cent of tax collected in 2005-06 to 3.8 per cent in 2007-08. The age of the direct tax debt has also reduced. Over the […]
This briefing has been prepared for the Treasury Select Committee (the Committee) to provide an overview of the work and performance of HM Treasury in the financial year 2007-08 and subsequent months. This briefing focuses upon the Treasury’s internal management and its financial position as a department in its own right.
The Prison Service has made significant progress in the way it manages its buying of goods and services such as food, clothing and utilities, the National Audit Office has today reported. In 2003 the National Audit Office found that the Prison Service’s procurement function was “fragmented and costly to deliver”. Since this report, the Prison […]
The Ministry of Defence programme to replace hundreds of different IT systems with a single, secure, high quality computer infrastructure is based on a sound rationale and convincing business case. According to a National Audit Office report issued today, the Defence Information Infrastructure Programme (DII) has delivered important benefits, but has run into implementation difficulties, […]
In its progress report on the Olympic and Paralympic Games the National Audit Office has found that with four years to go until the start of the Games, the preparations have progressed in important ways. In particular, there has been good progress in preparing the Olympic Park site and construction activities are broadly on track. […]
Plans to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of services such as human resources, payroll and finance could cost the Department for Transport £81 million (by March 2015) rather than saving £57 million as originally expected. There will need to be substantial improvements in the shared service centre’s productivity if the Department’s original targets are to […]
Delivering the National Programme for IT in the NHS is proving to be an enormous challenge. All elements of the Programme are advancing and some are complete, but the original timescales for the electronic Care Records Service, one of the central elements of the Programme, turned out to be unachievable, raised unrealistic expectations and put […]
HM Revenue & Customs achieved a return of around £4.50 for every £1 spent on tackling the hidden economy in 2006-07 and recent campaigns to encourage people into the formal economy have achieved much higher returns. But, according to the National Audit Office, the penalties the Department imposes when it detects people in the hidden […]
The National Audit Office has found that a good start has been made in preparing for the replacement by 2012 of the analogue television service with a digital one. Eighty-five per cent of households have already switched from analogue to digital TV for their main set. However, consumers will have to convert or replace another […]
The Department for International Development’s (DFID’s) use of budget support is helping developing country governments to build their capacity and expand basic services. But, according to a report out today by the National Audit Office, evidence on whether budget support has yielded better value for money than other forms of aid is not conclusive. While […]
The National Audit Office reported today that the effective delivery of community order sentences could be improved to secure the full benefits of the scheme by the National Probation Service. Not all components of community orders are used in all probation areas. In addition, there is incomplete data on the cost of orders and the […]
The Department for Work and Pensions has made good progress in tackling benefit fraud, which is estimated to have fallen from an estimated £2 billion in 2000-01 to £800 million in 2006-07, a substantial achievement by its staff, although definitional changes have helped. Tackling benefit fraud is inherently difficult as it is in the nature […]