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Author: Great Britain: National Audit Office
Publisher: The Stationery Office
ISBN: 9780102965490
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 34
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Book Description
This report, which focuses on 17 central government departments, finds that in 2009-10, these departments spent over £1 billion on consultants and interim managers (temporary replacements for permanent staff). The departments spent approximately £904 million on consultants in 2006-07. Spending on consultants fell by £126 million in 2007-08, but since then has remained broadly constant, totaling £789 million in 2009-10. Some of the fall in spending up to 2009-10 is likely to be due to increased accuracy in the recording of costs rather than improved control by management, suggesting that some of that reduction in spending is not sustainable. Limited and inconsistent progress has been made against recommendations made in previous NAO and Public Accounts Committee reports. The quality of departments' management information on consultants and interims is poor. Few departments can provide information on their spending by type of consultancy, the number of interims employed, or interims' roles and length of contracts. Departments do not always follow best practice when buying and managing consultancy and interims and most do not assess the performance of consultants or whether the work done was of benefit. In May 2010, the government introduced changes to the approval process for consultants and restrictions on recruitment, including interims, and this has helped to challenge their use. However, this is a short term impact and as a longer term strategy it could lead to the displacement of costs elsewhere. It needs to be built upon to deliver a sustainable approach to structured cost reduction
Author: Great Britain: National Audit Office
Publisher: The Stationery Office
ISBN: 9780102965490
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 34
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Book Description
This report, which focuses on 17 central government departments, finds that in 2009-10, these departments spent over £1 billion on consultants and interim managers (temporary replacements for permanent staff). The departments spent approximately £904 million on consultants in 2006-07. Spending on consultants fell by £126 million in 2007-08, but since then has remained broadly constant, totaling £789 million in 2009-10. Some of the fall in spending up to 2009-10 is likely to be due to increased accuracy in the recording of costs rather than improved control by management, suggesting that some of that reduction in spending is not sustainable. Limited and inconsistent progress has been made against recommendations made in previous NAO and Public Accounts Committee reports. The quality of departments' management information on consultants and interims is poor. Few departments can provide information on their spending by type of consultancy, the number of interims employed, or interims' roles and length of contracts. Departments do not always follow best practice when buying and managing consultancy and interims and most do not assess the performance of consultants or whether the work done was of benefit. In May 2010, the government introduced changes to the approval process for consultants and restrictions on recruitment, including interims, and this has helped to challenge their use. However, this is a short term impact and as a longer term strategy it could lead to the displacement of costs elsewhere. It needs to be built upon to deliver a sustainable approach to structured cost reduction
Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts
Publisher: The Stationery Office
ISBN: 9780215555656
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 44
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Book Description
Spending on consultants and interims by central government departments amounted to over £1 billion in 2009-10. In May 2010, the coalition Government announced immediate plans to save £1.1 billion on discretionary spending. In the first 6 months of 2010-11, the Cabinet Office reports that consultancy spending had fallen by 46% since 2009-10 due in part to new measures it has introduced to control the use of consultants, but due in the main to government stopping certain programmes. The Committee of Public Accounts has set out a number of conclusions, including: that the Committee does not accept the view expressed by the Cabinet Office that it is impossible to assess the value for money of consultancy work; that relying on consultants for commonly required skills is expensive; that the 'stop-go' approach to using consultants is not sustainable and does not deliver value for money. Further, it is unclear why some departments use consultants a great deal more than others, for example, every £100 spent on staff costs at the Department for Transport, £70 is spent on consultants. The Committee also states that the Cabinet Office has not done enough to grow the government's core skills. For the Committee, departments do not control and manage their spending on consultants and the prices paid are often based simply on time spent on a project, rather than being fixed in advance or related to the achievement of specific objectives.
Author: Great Britain. Treasury
Publisher: The Stationery Office
ISBN: 9780101801423
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 72
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Book Description
The reports published as HC 470 (ISBN 9780215555106); HC 440 (9780215555144); HC 471 (9780215555205); HC 439 (9780215555243); HC 538 (9780215555434); HC 424 (9780215555496); HC 553 (9780215555502); HC 503 (9780215555571); HC 573 (9780215555595); HC 610 (9780215555656); HC 594 (9780215555717), session 2010-11
Author: Great Britain: National Audit Office
Publisher: The Stationery Office
ISBN: 9780102969542
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 44
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Book Description
The total costs of central government staff grew by 10 per cent in real terms in the ten years to 2009-10, with current costs totalling £16.4 billion. Over the same period, staff numbers fell by 1 per cent, from 497,000 full time equivalents to 493,000. The growth in staff costs is largely the result of an unplanned increase in the number of staff in higher grades. Between March 2001 and March 2010, the number of administrative grade staff declined. But all higher grades grew in number, with Civil Service management grades 6 and 7 showing a 67 per cent increase (around 14,000 posts). This change in grade mix accounts directly for approximately 50 per cent of the staffing cost increase. Some 35 per cent of the real terms increase in staff costs is due to increases in salaries and performance-related pay. A range of immediate central actions in response to spending pressures has been announced, including freezes on pay and recruitment. But the longer term reductions in staff costs required by the 2010 Spending Review will be the responsibility of departments and agencies, and many do not have a comprehensive understanding of their own staff costs or skills in order to support this cost reduction activity adequately. The scale of staff cost reductions is unlikely to be achieved by natural turnover alone. Despite proposed changes to the Civil Service Compensation Scheme, the up-front costs of voluntary or compulsory redundancy schemes and early retirements will be significant.
Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts
Publisher: The Stationery Office
ISBN: 9780215556851
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 44
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Book Description
Government spending on the NHS has increased by 70%, from £60 billion in 2000-01 to £102 billion in 2010-11., with around 40% spent on services provided by acute and foundation hospitals. There have been significant improvements in the performance of the NHS, particularly in those areas targeted by the Department of Health (the Department) such as hospital waiting times and outcomes for patients with cancer and coronary heart disease. But productivity has actually fallen over the last decade. The Office for National Statistics estimates that, since 2000, total NHS productivity fell by an average of 0.2% a year, and by an average of 1.4% a year in hospitals. The trend of falling productivity will need to be reversed if the NHS is to meet the Department's productivity challenge, to deliver up to £20 billion of efficiency savings a year, by 2014-15, without compromising services. The Payment by Results approach (a tariff for procedures) has driven some improvements, but it only covers 60% of hospital activity and there is substantial variation in hospital costs and activity. The tariff system could, though, prioritise price over quality. National pay contracts have not yet been used to manage staff performance effectively, and consultants' productivity has fallen at the same time as they have had significant pay rises. There are risks to the NHS being able to deliver up to £20 billion savings annually, for reinvestment in healthcare, alongside implementing a substantial agenda of reform. Productivity improvements will be key to delivering these savings.
Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts
Publisher: The Stationery Office
ISBN: 9780215556745
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 64
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Book Description
There are around 30 different types of benefits and pensions, and £148 billion was paid out to 20 million people in 2009-10. The Department for Work and Pensions estimates that £2.2 billion of overpayments and £1.3 billion of underpayments were made in 2009-10 as a result of administrative errors by its staff and mistakes by customers. Efforts to tackle error have had little success and levels of error have remained constant since 2007. A joint HM Revenue and Customs and Department for Work and Pensions fraud and error strategy announced in October 2010, along with additional funding of £425 million over four years, is an opportunity to inject a new impetus. Importantly, the Department has not addressed underpayments, despite the hardship that benefit underpayments can create for people in need. Interventions to reduce error must be targeted where they are most likely to get the greatest return. Progress on reducing error requires a better understanding of where and why errors arise, and a greater focus on preventing errors occurring in the first place. The Department is not making use of all available sources of information to identify the reasons why staff make mistakes, where guidance and training efforts should be directed, and to identify which customers are most likely to make mistakes on their benefit claims. Wider welfare reforms have the potential to reduce errors in the long term by simplifying benefits administration, but waiting for the implementation of the Universal Credit is not an option.
Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts
Publisher: The Stationery Office
ISBN: 9780215561121
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 84
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Book Description
The National Programme for IT in the NHS is an ambitious £11.4 billion programme of investment. This report is concerned with a central part of the Programme, where the aim was to create a fully integrated electronic care records system, which is expected to cost around £7 billion in total The Department has failed to demonstrate the benefits achieved for the £2.7 billion spent to date on care records systems and has accepted it is unable to deliver its original vision. It is now relying on individual NHS trusts to develop systems compatible with those in the Programme. Furthermore the Department could not explain how potential inconsistencies would be dealt with or what it will cost local NHS organisations to connect up. The Department has not got the best out of its suppliers, despite having paid them some £1.8 billion so far. One supplier, CSC, has yet to deliver the bulk of the systems it is contracted to supply and has instead implemented a large number of interim systems as a stopgap. The Department has been in negotiations with CSC for over a year, but conceded that it may be more expensive to terminate the contract than to complete it. The Department has also revised its contract with BT reducing the number of systems and increasing the price for each system delivered. This has resulted in BT being paid £9 million to implement systems at each NHS site, even though the same systems have been purchased for under £2 million by NHS organisations outside the Programme. The Committee is further concerned about the problems in getting timely and reliable information from the Department. Information provided has frequently been late, has contained inconsistencies and has contradicted other evidence.
Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts
Publisher: The Stationery Office
ISBN: 9780215044075
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 48
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Book Description
The Department for Education is distributing £56.4 billion in 2011-12 to schools, local authorities and other public bodies for the delivery of education and children's services in England. The Department has set out how it intends to provide Parliament with assurance about the regularity, propriety and value for money in an Accountability System Statement (the Statement) of which the Committee has now seen three drafts. Responsibility for value for money is shared by the Department with schools, academy trusts, local authorities, the Young People's Learning Agency and the Department for Communities and Local Government. However, the Statement does not yet clearly describe the specific responsibilities of each body, how these will interact, or how the Department will assess value for money across the entire education system. The Department relies on local authorities and the YPLA to exercise financial oversight over local authority maintained schools and academies respectively. However, oversight by some local authorities is currently weak and could worsen as many authorities reduce the resources they devote to overseeing their schools. There are also concerns about whether the YPLA will have the right skills, systems and capacity to oversee the rapidly increasing numbers of academies expected in coming years. More consistent requirements for data and data returns must be applied to all schools so that academic and financial performance can be benchmarked, and all schools can be held accountable. The Department needs to enforce these requirements more stringently, particularly given previous problems with lack of compliance
Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts
Publisher: The Stationery Office
ISBN: 9780215038821
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 52
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Book Description
When the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) had started, the Department had contracts for two carriers with an estimated cost of £5.24 billion and delivery dates of 2016 and 2018. Decisions taken in the Review mean the UK will have no carrier aircraft capability from 2011-2020. While two carriers are still being built, only one will be converted to launch the planes that have now been selected, and the other will be mothballed. The UK will only have one operational carrier with a significantly reduced availability at sea when Carrier Strike capability is reintroduced in 2020. That carrier is being built according to the old design and will have to be modified to make it compatible with the requirements of the new aircraft: the cost of these modifications will not be known until 2012. The SDSR decision is forecast to save £3.4 billion, but only £600 million of this is cash savings while the remainder is simply deferring expenditure beyond the Department's 10 year planning horizon. The decision will lead to nine years without Carrier Strike and full capability will not be achieved until 2030. And more work will be needed to get the best and most flexible operational use from the carrier. The Committee is disappointed that the systemic issues that have appeared in its other recent defence reports continue to arise. The Committee has built on what has been said in past reports and focussed on two key areas: strategic decision-making and delivery of capabilities
Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts
Publisher: The Stationery Office
ISBN: 9780215045256
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 48
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Book Description
The Ministry of Defence announced in the summer of 2010 that it had a funding gap of £38 billion over the next ten years. As part of the Government's efforts to reduce the deficit, the Department also needs to reduce its annual spending by 7.5% in real terms by 2015. It intends to achieve a significant proportion of its required savings by reducing its civilian personnel by 29,000 and its military personnel by 25,000, which it estimates will save £4.1 billion between 2011 and 2015. The Department is currently enacting a transformation programme to change its way of working in order to deliver on the Strategic Defence and Security Review priorities with fewer staff. However, the Department has put plans in place to implement reductions in its workforce before it has finalised its new operating model. The operating model will set out how the Department will meet its objectives in the future, but its reductions in workforce will be well advanced before the model is agreed. There is concern that plans to reduce the workforce have been determined more by the need to cut costs than by considering how to deliver its strategic objectives and that there is a risk of further skills gaps developing. This could make the Department increasingly reliant on external expertise with consultancy expenditure having already grown from £6 million in 2006-07 to £270 million in 2010-11.
