Finance

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.