Finance

The National Audit Office may need additional resources to carry out investigations into “distributed services” in the health and education sectors, according to its comptroller and auditor general Amyas Morse. With the creation of academies and clinical commissioning groups, for example, the number of service providers accountable to Parliament is growing fast.

Departments must stop using commercial confidentiality as a reason for withholding information about contracts, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said in a report published today.

Poor financial forecasting is an “entrenched” problem in the civil service, and leads to money being wasted across departments, the National Audit Office has said.

The Serious Fraud Office has asked for emergency funding of £19m to pay for higher than expected expenditure on a series of big investigations.

At least 2% of the government’s benefits expenditure has been taken up by fraud and error since 2005, according to new figures released by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

A total of £12bn should be cut from the welfare bill in the first two years of next Parliament, in order to spare government departments from “even faster cuts”, chancellor George Osborne has announced today.

Sharon White, currently director general for public services, has been appointed as the second permanent secretary at HM Treasury.

One of the architects of the Freedom of Information Act has told Civil Service World that this “very radical policy” is “capable of being expensive and burdensome”, and suggested that the rules governing disclosure require departments to make very complex – and thus expensive – decisions.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has requested flexibility to improve the pay of top staff in order to compete with the private sector, senior officials told two hearings of the Commons’ Defence Committee in the last week.

The National Audit Office (NAO) will “start doing comparative reports of similar activities in departments” from next year, comptroller and auditor general Amyas Morse has said.

The Home Office has outsourced its payments processing to NS&I, the state-owned savings bank, it was announced earlier this month.

Treasury permanent secretary Nick Macpherson has called on government departments to improve their institutional memory.

The efforts of Companies House (CH) to tackle fraud should be based on “strengthening the current model rather than radically changing company law”, its chief executive has told CSW, to ensure that anti-fraud work doesn’t weaken transparency in business information or create additional burdens on business.

Reforms overseen by the Cabinet Office’s Efficiency and Reform Group (ERG) have generated £10bn savings in the last financial year, ministers have today announced.

Parliament and government should agree a Code of Legislative Standards to improve the quality of laws produced at Westminster, according to a report published yesterday by the Political and Constitutional Reform committee.

Companies run by two lead departmental non-executive directors (Neds) have been publicly accused of serious wrongdoing.

The government needs a chief financial officer (CFO) “who is clearly and visibly responsible for ensuring that spending decisions are made on the basis of financial analysis and for measuring the outcomes in terms of value for money and performance management,” Rebecca McCaffry, innovation specialist at the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA), has told CSW.

The annual drama of the Budget is a dysfunctional relic and should be scrapped, says Julian McCrae. Ministers and civil servants have bigger – and more nourishing – fish to fry.

The civil service pay cap will continue for an extra year, limiting pay increases to an average of one per cent per year until 2015-16, and the government will also seek to end automatic pay rises for all civil servants, chancellor George Osborne announced in his Budget last week.

The collapse of the West Coast Mainline franchising process won’t deter the Department for Transport (DfT) from taking necessary risks, the department’s permanent secretary has promised in an interview with CSW.

Four areas piloting ‘Whole Place’ community budgets will produce estimated public spending savings of over £200 million a year between them over the next five years.

The government has signed an agreement with private-sector partner arvato to manage an independently-run shared service centre, which will run back-office transactions to government departments. The move is intended to create savings of up to £600m a year over seven years.