Douglas is leading the ‘Finance Transformation Programme’: an initiative to improve finance skills across government. The scheme will make permanent secretaries responsible for ensuring that their senior civil servants have a general level of financial competency.
At present, senior civil servants lack sufficient skills to assess spending and cut waste, he said: “We haven’t fundamentally changed financial management in government… We haven’t changed the way that government and civil servants think about its use.”
He added: “We’re all trying to focus on driving out waste, driving out low-priority spending. The only way you can do that is by understanding the relationship between the money you spend and the outcomes you get for that.”
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