The Government Finance Function has made an excellent start on its 2030 strategy, with “strong foundations” for delivering its aims of putting finance at the heart of departmental decision-making, according to a report from the National Audit Office.
The public spending watchdog said the 9,000-plus member GFF understands the need for a step change and has strong, visible leadership and an “engaged and active” membership “putting in place the elements necessary to measure progress against its strategic aims”.
The NAO encourages the function to lead on the testing and adoption of artificial intelligence for finance-related tasks. It also calls on the organisation to put in place a “consistent, cross‑government approach” to financial management capability among senior civil service budget holders.
GFF is jointly led by HM Treasury director general for public spending Conrad Smewing and Home Office chief operating officer Tara Smith. It published the 2030 strategy in July last year, weeks after departments signed up to deliver annual efficiencies in the region of £14bn over the next few years as part of the 2025 Spending Review.
The NAO report says the GFF’s ability to successfully deliver its strategy will ultimately depend on the extent to which it can overcome “enduring structural and cultural barriers”. It lists “legacy” IT systems, the poor quality of cost data in government and the lack of incentives for non-finance staff to prioritise good financial management among those barriers.
However the report notes that GFF has positive engagement across Whitehall, with 90% of departments rated “good” or “excellent” for their finance teams’ interaction with the function in 2024-25, according to HM Treasury data.
The NAO report concludes that the GFF has laid out a clear ambition to strengthen financial management across government and has established many of the foundations needed to succeed.
It recommends that the GFF should now look at how its work could go beyond impacting just finance teams and set out clearly how it will work across government to truly have influence with senior leaders, HR teams and budget holders.
The report says the pace and potential of AI use in government presents “a significant opportunity” for the GFF to transform the impact of the finance function.
In particular, it says the GFF should use its innovation committee to support structured experimentation in AI use across the finance profession by defining “priority problem areas” where AI could improve productivity and quality, and capturing and sharing learning on opportunities and risks from pilots.
The NAO says the function’s AI work should also see it championing the most effective use cases, so that departments can adopt them with confidence, and using its influence to remove barriers to scaling up appropriate AI use across government, such as through work to support the standardisation of financial data.
Another report recommendation calls on the function to coordinate with departments, shared service providers and other central partners to “define and implement a consistent, cross‑government approach to senior civil service budget holder financial management capability”.
The NAO says such work would be designed to strengthen demand for finance insight and support better decision‑making, and should include agreeing a “baseline of knowledge and behaviours” expected of SCS budget holders and promoting a “coherent training offer”.
NAO head Gareth Davies said the GFF has a major contribution to make to maximising the potential of the nation’s finances at a time of technical innovation and increasing demands.
“As government responds to significant pressures on public spending and public services, strong financial management will be critical to helping departments make better decisions, improve productivity and deliver better value for taxpayers,” he said.
“The Government Finance Function has created strong foundations and must continue to build on these. We will work with the function and wider government to share insights, identify good practice and support efforts to strengthen financial management across the public sector.”
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, chair of parliament’s Public Accounts Committee welcomed the ambition set out in the 2030 strategy and urged the GFF to hone its thinking on AI-adoption.
“Artificial intelligence presents a significant opportunity to transform financial management and boost productivity, but only if government prioritises the right specialist skills and tackles the longstanding issues of poor-quality cost data and legacy IT systems,” he said. “The function must now deepen its understanding of what AI will mean in practice for skills and headcount, so that it can reap the full benefits of new technology.”