The easiest cuts in public spending have been made. To make bigger savings without affecting its customers, government needs to find new ways to organise and deliver public services. For example, it has started to delegate to local organisations and contract out services, create market-like ways of choosing and supplying services, and use digital technology better.
To succeed, government needs new skills and new ways to manage customers, ensuring that services are not disrupted. It also needs to coordinate national priorities such as growth, environmental management and infrastructure development.
The NAO shares the lessons and good practice it has identified across government in specific aspects such as Strategic centre of government; Customer management; Digital services; User choice and protection; Economic growth; and Environmental sustainability.
Key NAO publications: Transformation guidance for audit committees (May 2018); The art of spending public money wisely (Oct 2015); Welfare reform - lessons learned (May 2015); Transforming government's contract management (Sep 2014); and Financial management in government (Jun 2013)
This ‘think piece’ draws on our past work highlighting the barriers that prevent health and social care services working together effectively, examples of joint working and the move towards services centred on the needs of the individual, to inform the ongoing debate about the future of health and social care in England.
This report provides an update on HMRC’s progress with the Customs Declaration Service (CDS) since July 2017. We consider the deliverability of the CDS programme and highlight the risks and issues HMRC needs to manage to fully implement CDS by January 2019.
Transformation programmes can be highly complicated and risky. This guidance assists those overseeing them by setting out questions committees should ask during set-up, delivery and live-running phases.
In this report we outline what HM Courts and Tribunals Service’s (HMCTS) change portfolio to modernise and upgrade the justice system will deliver, consider early progress against plans and explore how HMCTS and its partners have managed the change portfolio and the risks it faces in the future.
Additional funding, aimed to help the NHS get on a financially sustainable footing, has instead been spent on coping with existing pressures.
Digital transformation has a mixed track record across government. It has not yet provided a level of change that will allow government to further reduce costs while still meeting people’s needs.
The Better Care Fund has not achieved the expected value for money, in terms of savings, outcomes for patients or hospital activity.
HMRC aimed to move more customers online thereby reducing staff costs but significant numbers of staff were let go before technical improvements were completed leading to a collapse in service quality in 2015. Services have since improved.
This overview of the NAO’s work on the government’s management of contracting examines subjects including the government’s commercial capability, accountability and transparency, and its management of contracted-out service delivery.
Probation services have been restructured on time and within cost targets during a period of major change but operational problems and risks to further service transformation need to be resolved if re-offending levels are to reduce.