The purpose of the Cabinet Office is to ensure that the government works together to deliver for the people of the United Kingdom. The Cabinet Office supports the Prime Minister and ensures the effective running of the government. It is also the corporate headquarters for the government, in partnership with HM Treasury, and it takes […]
Cabinet Office oversees how departments implement Cabinet decisions. It spends approximately £1 billion each year.
Government has opportunities to improve the efficient management of its workforce, including on recruitment, pay and performance management.
Find the NAO’s reports, insights and overviews by government department or other public body.
This report examines the management of the Cabinet Office-led Get ready for Brexit campaign.
Government has repeatedly changed its plans for introducing full import controls following the UK’s exit from the European Union (EU).
The Government has made progress delivering its latest strategy to share back-office services across Whitehall departments in the past year, but remaining barriers will need to be addressed for it to deliver its plans by 2028 and achieve value for money, according to the National Audit Office.
This report examines the progress the government has made in developing specialist skills in the civil service.
Given the prevalence of government-funded inquiries, the frequency with which the government uses them following high-profile failures, their importance in relation to the public’s trust of authorities, and the public funds spent on them, the NAO has conducted an investigation into the 26 inquiries that have started and concluded since 2005.
This investigation examines the extent to which departments have used consultants in
their work to prepare for exiting the EU.
This report examines how effectively the Cabinet Office coordinates the 2016–2021 National Cyber Security Programme.
This report investigates the NHS’s response to the cyber attack that affected it in May 2017 and the impact on health services.
Departments have continued to reduce their estates and government is now getting better value for money. The Government Property Unit, however, has not yet made much progress towards its more challenging objective of creating an integrated estate.
Annual spending on consultants and temporary staff has reduced by £1.5 billion since 2010 when strict spending controls were introduced. However, annual spend is now increasing once more and is between £400 million and £600 million higher than in 2011-12.
The Cabinet Office is responsible for the Business Appointment Rules, but has not published any guidelines, and has no oversight of departmental compliance.
Government has given less attention to grants than to other policy funding mechanisms, despite grant funding being higher in value, making up 41 per cent (£292 billion) of its total expenditure.
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.
Government is taking longer than it should to appoint non-executive directors (NED) to public positions, and these delays can leave gaps on boards, creating risks to governance, and reducing the number of high-quality candidates.
The approach to reducing the cost of regulation is set up to ensure that government can hit a £10bn target but misses the point by not truly reducing costs on businesses.
Some 75 per cent of the data systems government departments use to report progress against their Public Service Agreements (PSA) 2005-08 targets are broadly appropriate, but fewer than half of these were fully fit for purpose. The National Audit Office has also found there have been no significant improvements in data systems since previous analysis […]