Download or read book Fifty eighth report of session 2010 12 written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: European Scrutiny Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifty-eighth report of Session 2010-12 : Documents considered by the Committee on 7 March 2012, including the following recommendation for debate, recognition of professional qualifications, report, together with formal minutes, minutes of evidence and Ap

Download or read book Fifty ninth report of session 2010 12 written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: European Scrutiny Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-03-22 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifty-ninth report of Session 2010-12 : Documents considered by the Committee on 14 March 2012, including the following recommendations for debate, White Paper on Pensions; EU criminal justice legislation and detention, report, together with formal Minute

Download or read book HM Revenue Customs written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2011-12-20 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: HM Revenue & Customs faces a huge challenge to resolve long-standing problems with the administration of PAYE and tax credits while making substantial reductions to its running costs. The Department needs to stabilise its administration of PAYE following the problems encountered after a new processing system was introduced in 2009. It also needs to recover a significant amount of outstanding tax credit debt while minimising the amount of new debt being accumulated. While £900 million extra has been allocated to tackle tax avoidance, at the same time, following the 2010 Spending Review, the Department is required to reduce its running costs by £1.6 billion over the next four years. The Department has made progress in improving PAYE administration since the Committee's last examination of this area in 2010. However, as a consequence of the Department's handling of the 2009 transition to the new PAYE Service, it has had to forgo up to £1.2 billion of income tax underpaid from 2004-05 to 2009-10. Under current plans, it will take until 2013 before all processing backlogs are cleared and the new PAYE Service is operating as intended. The Department needs to focus on improving data quality in particular to sustain progress in PAYE administration. Without a clear plan for reducing tax credit debt, the level of uncollected debt will continue to rise to an estimated £7.4 billion by 2014-15. The Department has been forced to acknowledge that much of this debt will never be recovered from tax credit claimants, and recently wrote off some £1.1 billion of debt dating back to the introduction of the scheme.

Download or read book Twenty eighth report of session 2010 12 written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: European Scrutiny Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2011-05-24 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-eighth report of Session 2010-12 : Documents considered by the Committee on 11 May 2011, including the following recommendations for debate, space policy; cultivation of genetically modified crops; transport policy, report, together with formal Min

Download or read book Accountability for public money progress report written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-04-17 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report is a follow-up to the Committee's report on Accountability for Public Money (HC 740, session 2010-11 (ISBN 9780215559029)) an issue at the core of the relationship between Parliament and government. Accounting Officers remain accountable to Parliament for funds voted to their departments but the policy intention is that local bodies will have significant discretion over the services they deliver. In the Government's response, 'Accountability: Adapting to Decentralisation', Sir Bob Kerslake drew a distinction between those services that government delivers directly and those that it may fund but are delivered in more decentralised arrangements. He proposed that Accounting Officers set out, in Accountability System Statements, the arrangements they have in place to provide assurance about the probity and value for money of funds spent through devolved systems. All departments are expected to produce Statements by summer 2012. Departments have made a genuine effort to develop arrangements which reconcile accountability and localism but the Statements so far are unwieldy and considerably more needs to be done to improve their clarity, consistency and completeness. There is concern that accountability frameworks must drive value for money and, critically, are sufficiently robust to address the operational or financial failure of service providers. Departments are placing increasing reliance on market mechanisms such as user choice to drive up performance and value for money, but there are limits to what these mechanisms can achieve. The Treasury needs to take ownership of the system and ensure that the Comptroller and Auditor General has the necessary powers and rights of access to examine the value for money of funds spent through devolved systems

Download or read book Ministry of Defence written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-05-25 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Care Quality Commission written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-03-30 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The NAO report on this topic published as HC 1665, session 2010-12 (ISBN 9780102977011)

Download or read book Eighth report of session 2012 13 written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: European Scrutiny Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-07-19 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Forty eighth report of session 2010 12 written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: European Scrutiny Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2011-12-15 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forty-eighth report of Session 2010-12 : Documents considered by the Committee on 7 December 2011, including the following recommendations for debate, Energy efficiency, Trans-European Networks: integrated EU infrastructures, EU financial instruments for

Download or read book Sixty third report of session 2010 12 written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: European Scrutiny Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-04-27 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Preparations for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-03-09 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Olympic Delivery Authority's management of its building programme has been exemplary but, due to significant increases in the cost of venue security, the likelihood of staying within the overall £9.3 billion Public Sector Funding Package is very finely balanced. The Funding Package does not cover the totality of the costs to the public purse of delivering the Games and their legacy, which are already heading for around £11 billion. Operational and financial risks have emerged in areas of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games' responsibility, and LOCOG itself now has almost no contingency left to meet further costs, even though it has done well in its revenue generation. The number of security guards required in and around the venues has more than doubled, and renegotiation of the contract for venue security does not appear to have secured any price advantage. With only 109,000 new people regularly participating in sport against an original target (which the new Government chose not to adopt) of 1 million by March 2013, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has got poor value for money for the £450 million spent through sporting National Governing Bodies. It is unclear what the sporting participation legacy of the Games is intended to be. Responsibility for delivery of all legacy matters is shared across many different parts of Government, and this rings alarm bells about the effective integration of the various legacy plans and about clear accountability to the taxpayer.

Download or read book Sessional Returns written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-09-14 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On cover and title page: House, committees of the whole House, general committees and select committees

Download or read book Cost reduction in central government written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-04-27 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The National Audit Office report on this topic published as HC 1788, session 2010-12 (ISBN 9780102975376)

Download or read book Adult apprenticeships written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-05-17 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills works with the Skills Funding Agency (the Agency) and the National Apprenticeship Service (the Service), to deliver the Apprenticeship Programme. Adult apprentices represented 325,500, or 71%, of the 457,200 apprentices who started their apprenticeship in the 2010/11 academic year. During the 2010-11 financial year the Department spent £451 million on adult apprenticeships. The Programme has been a success more than quadrupling the number of adult apprenticeships in the four years to 2010/11 and the proportion of adult apprentices successfully completing their apprenticeship has also risen, from around a third in 2004/05 to over three-quarters in 2010/11. Further work, however, needs to be done to maximise its impacts. The Department should improve its understanding of which apprenticeships offer the biggest returns. The Service should give both employers and individuals better information about the benefits arising from different types of apprenticeship, as well as about the quality of the many training providers. The Service should do more to increase the number of employers offering apprenticeships, and to increase the proportion of advanced skill level apprenticeships achieved, moving England closer to the levels delivered in other European countries. Importantly, around one in five apprenticeships lasted for six months or less. The Service accepts concern that apprenticeships lasting for such a short period are of no proper benefit to either individuals or employers. The Service says it is tackling the problem but it needs to do more to guarantee the length and quality of training -especially the off-the-job training apprentices receive

Download or read book Equity investment in privately financed projects written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-05-02 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report examines the risks and rewards for private equity investors in government private finance projects. The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) model has been used by governments in some 700 projects over the last 20 years but defects, including failures to demonstrate the value for money case satisfactorily, the use of long inflexible contracts and the costly contracting process, and inefficient pricing of equity have made continuing with the current model unsustainable. The Treasury is currently reviewing the PFI model. It needs to improve flexibility in the way that private finance is used, establishing quicker and more efficient procurement procedures and achieving a better balance between investors' risks and their rewards. Private finance should only be used where it secures real value for money for the taxpayer, not because of definitional statistical incentives to get projects off the balance sheet (only some 20% of long term PFI liabilities are recorded as debt in the national accounts). Business cases must be an unbiased and transparent assessment of the best form of procurement for the particular project being undertaken, taking account of expected tax receipts from alternative options and not adjusting assumptions to bias the outcome of the assessment. The Treasury needs to collect data on investors' experiences and use this information to assess and challenge investors' returns. There needs to be greater transparency over the pricing of contracts, and inefficiencies which add to the cost of private deals, such as long procurement times, need to be addressed.

Download or read book The free entitlement to education for three and four year olds written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-05-22 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Department for Education provides funding for local authorities to pay for three and four year olds to receive their entitlement to 15 hours of free education each week. The Department devolves delivery to local authorities and providers but it is responsible for the overall value for money from the system. In 2011-12 the Department's estimated funding for the entitlement of £1.9 billion provided over 800,000 three and four year olds with access to free education; an estimated annual allocation of approximately £2,300 per child. While the Department and local authorities have focused on ensuring places for children are available, there has been less attention on how value for money can be secured and improved. While there is evidence of educational improvement at age five, the evidence that this is sustained is questionable. The Department needs to do more to understand how educational benefits can be lasting. There is not enough good information for parents to make informed choices and there is concern at reports that some families are still not receiving the entitlement free of charge. It is important that all parents know what the entitlement is and that it should be provided completely free. Early years education has the greatest benefit for children from disadvantaged backgrounds however these children have the lowest levels of take-up and deprived areas have the lowest levels of high quality services. The Department needs to identify and share good practice from those local authorities which are having the most success.

Download or read book Department for Work and Pensions written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-05-15 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Work Programme, designed to help long-term unemployed people into sustainable employment, started in June 2011, replacing virtually all welfare to work programmes run by the Department for Work and Pensions. Over the next five years, the Programme is expected to help up to 3.3 million people at a cost of £3-5 billion. 18 prime contractors, each with sub-contractors, are contracted to deliver the Programme across England, Scotland and Wales. The Department has done well to introduce the Work Programme in 12 months. Prime contractors receive the majority of their payments once a participant has stayed in a job for a set period of time, with the length of time varying according to claimant group. Although some financial risks have been transferred to the providers, the test of whether the Programme is achieving value for money will be whether more people are in work as a result of the Programme than would have been if it had not existed and that the wider social benefits which underpin the cost benefit analysis are delivered in practice. The Department should seek assurance on a range of issues: that sub contractors are treated fairly, not misled into accepting inappropriate contracts, and receive the number of cases and funding they were promised; that harder to help claimants are not parked and ignored; and ensuring proper value for money. The Department relies on contractors to set minimum standards of service but has no measurable indicators against which the quality of service can be judged