Finance

Fraud is widespread at government contractors A4e and Working Links, their former head of audit, Eddie Hutchinson, has said.

A solicitor representing David Owen, a civil servant suing the Treasury for unfair dismissal, has said that officials are threatening to ignore the judge’s decision should he rule in Owen’s favour.

All departments must identify five per cent of their budgets that they could cut if they require contingency funding, chief secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander said in a speech to the Institute for Fiscal Studies this week.

Departments must think of the long-term when setting out budgets as part of a Spending Review, the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) has said in a report published yesterday.

The Treasury must take ownership of the new system of accountability that will develop as a result of public service reforms, the Public Accounts Committee has said.

Departmental expenditure limits (DEL) will need to fall by 3.8 per cent per year in the first two years of the next Parliament – even more than the current annual cuts of 2.3 per cent – unless there are deeper cuts to annual managed expenditure (AME) budgets, chancellor George Osborne said in his Budget last week.

Shadow chancellor Ed Balls said at Queen Mary University last week that granting the Bank of England independence in 1997 “increased the power of the Treasury, because it allowed the Treasury to say: ‘Well, I see you want to make that decision, prime minister, and I can see why you’d want to do that, but I’m not sure the independent Bank of England will wear it.”

A poll by CSW, carried out in partnership with analytics company SAS, has found that 74 per cent of senior civil servants and 73 per cent of all civil servants believe that departments and agencies would be better incentivised to tackle fraud and error if they were allowed to keep some of the savings.

Departmental select committee chairs have provided mixed reviews of the departments they scrutinise for a Civil Service World Special Report, which has found that 40 per cent of them are dissatisfied with departments’ responses to their reports.

Public Accounts Committee (PAC) chair Margaret Hodge yesterday welcomed the publication of the Whole of Government Accounts (WGA), calling them a “major step forward in improving transparency and accountability.”

Finance skills should be central to the civil service reforms now being developed by head of the civil service Sir Bob Kerslake, the head of the government finance profession has said. Speaking in a CSW interview, Department of Health finance chief Richard Douglas said: “I’m hoping and expecting that Bob Kerslake will take [finance skills] forward as a key plank of civil service reform.”