Finance

An official responsible for an IT contracting error which cost the Ministry of Defence (MoD) £70m is no longer working for the department, its permanent secretary Jon Thompson told the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on 16 June​.

The Education Funding Agency (EFA) needs to get “to grips with effective oversight to improve public confidence in the system,” the Public Accounts Committee warned in a report.

The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) has committed to spending up to £10bn on the government’s Help to Buy scheme without establishing whether it represents the most effective way of using taxpayers’ money, the Public Accounts Committee have said in a report published on 18 July.

The National Audit Office helped government to achieve £1.1bn of savings in 2014-14, according to its annual report published this week, but missed its own targets to complete 40% of its studies in six months and 85% within nine months – completing just 35% and 74% of reports in the respective time limits.

The High Speed 2 company needs to be given greater freedoms from Treasury restrictions so that it can attract the best project managers and construction workers, Alison Munro, chief executive of the project, has told Civil Service World.

Audit and governance arrangements for free schools are “not yet effective,” according to a Public Accounts Committee report published last week.

Sir Nicholas Macpherson, the Treasury permanent secretary, has told MPs that he decided to publish his advice warning the chancellor against a currency union with an independent Scotland because it was “vital to the national interest”.

Two departments will pilot new pay rules which give them greater flexibility in spending their pay budget, the Budget announced today.

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.