Download or read book HC 833 Financial Sustainability of Local Authorities 2014 written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2015 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Department for Communities and Local Government does not have a good enough understanding of the impact of funding cuts, either on local authorities' finances or on services. It is unclear whether the Department is exercising a cross government leadership role with respect to local government. It relies on data on spending and has little information on service levels, service quality, and financial sustainability. HM Treasury should better support the Department by ensuring compliance with its requests for information at future spending reviews. While the Department has identified that local authorities will need to change the way they deliver services to remain financially sustainable, it is unclear if it is providing sufficient leadership to ensure they can implement service transformation programmes successfully. Furthermore, if funding reductions were to continue following the next spending review, we question whether the Department would be in a position to provide assurance that all local authorities could maintain the full range of their statutory services. Overall, as pressure from cuts grows, so do the risks to local authorities' finances and their provision of services. The depth and quality of the Department's insight into these issues needs to keep pace with these changes, something it has struggled to achieve so far.

Download or read book HC 736 Financial Sustainability Of NHS Bodies written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2015 with total page 23 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The financial health of NHS bodies has worsened in the last two financial years. The overall net surplus achieved by NHS bodies in 2012-13 of £2.1 billion fell to £722 million in 2013-14. The percentage of NHS trusts and foundation trusts in deficit increased from 10% in 2012-13 to 26% in 2013-14. Monitor found that 80% of foundation trusts that provide acute hospital services were reporting a deficit by the second quarter of 2014-15. NHS England, Monitor and the NHS Trust Development Authority recognise that radical change is needed to the way services are provided and that extra resources are required if the NHS is to become financially sustainable. The necessary changes will require further upfront investment. Present incentives to reduce A&E attendance and increase community based care services have not had the impact expected. New incentives and strong relationships are needed to promote the more effective collaboration necessary for delivering new models of care.

Download or read book HC 811 Financial Support for Students at Alternative Higher Education Providers written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2015 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Approximately 140 institutions offering higher education are termed 'alternative providers'. These alternative providers comprise a diverse range of organisations ranging from private companies to charitable institutions. They do not receive government grants directly but do access public funding through student loans which are used to pay their fees. Following the announcement of higher education reforms in 2011, and the associated increase in tuition fee loans, there has been substantial and rapid growth in the sector. Between 2010/11 and 2013/14, the number of students claiming support for courses at alternative providers rose from 7,000 to 53,000. Over the same period, the total amount of public money paid to students at alternative providers, through tuition fee loans and maintenance loans and grants, has risen from around £50 million to around £675 million. The Department has overall responsibility for oversight of publicly-funded higher education, including alternative providers with publicly-funded students. The Department did not learn from previous Government experience, furthermore, it has been slow to react to warning signs. The rapid expansion in numbers was concentrated in five colleges that accounted for 50% of the expansion. 20% of students receiving funding were not registered for a qualification and drop-out rates were very high in some institutions. There was also evidence from whistleblowers that proficiency in English language was not tested, that some institutions were recruiting students on the streets, and that students claiming funding were not attending colleges.

Download or read book HC 860 Tax Avoidance The Role Of Large Accountancy Firms Follow Up written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2015 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tax arrangements PwC promoted in Luxembourg bear all the characteristics of a mass-marketed tax avoidance scheme according to the Public Accounts Committee. Large accountancy firms advise multinational companies on complex strategies and contrived structures which do not reflect the substance of their businesses and are instead designed to avoid tax. In light of the publication of leaked documents detailing some of the tax advice it has given to its multinational clients, the Committee took evidence from PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC). PwC did not convince the Committee that its widespread promotion of schemes to numerous clients, based on artificially diverting profits to Luxembourg through intra-company loans, constituted anything other than the promotion of tax avoidance on an industrial scale. The fact that PwC's promotion of these schemes is permitted by its own code of conduct is clear evidence that Government needs to take a more active role in regulating the tax industry, as it evidently cannot be trusted to regulate itself. HMRC should set out how it plans to take a more active role in challenging the advice being given by accountancy firms to their multinational clients. In contributing to the OECD's discussions aimed at reforming international tax law, HMRC should push for a more rigorous and meaningful definition of what "substance" means in respect of business, particularly if multinational companies conduct any business in the countries where they shift profits to in order to avoid tax. The Committee believes strongly that the Government must act by introducing a code of conduct for all tax advisers.

Download or read book HC 892 The Effective Management of Tax Reliefs written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2015 with total page 21 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tax and tax reliefs are plainly different and require different accountability arrangements. Put simply tax is where you get money in through taxation and a tax relief is where you make a conscious decision to forgo that income. Some reliefs are structural parts of the system to ensure a more progressive system or avoid double taxation. But other reliefs, costing some £100 billion a year, are designed to deliver a policy objective that could be met instead through spending programmes. HM Treasury and HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) do not keep track of those tax reliefs intended to influence behaviour. They do not adequately report to Parliament or the public on whether reliefs are working as intended and what they cost and whether they represent good value for money. While HMRC is accountable for implementing and monitoring all tax reliefs, its statements about the extent of its responsibilities are inconsistent with its actual practices. HMRC accepts it has a role to assess, evaluate and monitor reliefs, but is unable or unwilling to define or to categorise reliefs by their purpose. While HMRC accepts the need for reporting the costs of tax reliefs, it does not see the merit in assessing the economy, efficiency and effectiveness of reliefs, or considering their cost effectiveness alongside that of alternative policy instruments such as spending programmes. HMRC does not generally assess the effectiveness of reliefs with specific objectives although in a few instances it does consider their impact on taxpayer behaviour. HMRC's failure to articulate a set of principles to guide its management and reporting of tax reliefs is a serious omission which it now needs to rectify.

Download or read book HC 973 Care Services for People with Learning Disabilities and Challenging Behaviour written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2015 with total page 25 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Winterbourne View scandal in 2011 exposed the horrific abuse of people with learning difficulties and challenging behaviour in a private mental health hospital. Concerns were also raised about a number of other institutions. As a result, the Government committed to discharging those individuals for whom it was appropriate back into their homes and communities. However, since then, too many children and adults have continued to go into mental health hospitals, and to stay there unnecessarily, because of the lack of community alternatives. The number of people with learning disabilities remaining in hospital has not fallen, and has remained broadly the same at around 3,200. It was refreshing that NHS England took responsibility for this lack of progress and has now committed to develop a closure programme for large NHS mental health hospitals, along with a transition plan for the people with learning disabilities within these hospitals, from 2016-17. Discharges from hospital are being delayed because funding does not follow the individual when they are discharged into the community. This acts as a financial disincentive for local commissioners who have to bear the costs and responsibility for planning and commissioning community services. Delaying discharge has the effect of institutionalising people, making their reintegration into the community more difficult. Some local authorities' reluctance to accept and fund individuals in the community will be exacerbated by current financial constraints. The Department should set out its proposals for 'dowry-type' payments from NHS England to meet the costs of supporting people discharged from hospital.

Download or read book HC 971 An Update on Hinchingbrooke Health Care NHS Trust written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2015 with total page 25 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The taxpayer has been left exposed by the failure of the Hinchingbrooke franchise according to the Public Accounts Committee's report. In February 2012, Circle took operational control of Hinchingbrooke Health Care NHS Trust, becoming the first private company to run an NHS hospital. In January 2013, the Committee expressed concerns that Circle's bid to run Hinchingbrooke had not been properly risk assessed and was based on overly optimistic and unachievable savings projections. The Department of Health responded that the NHS Trust Development Authority would monitor progress and take action if the Trust was failing to deliver on its plans to make the hospital financially sustainable. In the event, Circle was not able to make the Trust sustainable and the NHS Trust Development Authority did not take effective action to protect the taxpayer. In January 2015, Circle announced that it intended to withdraw from the contract, just three years into the 10-year franchise. It was clear at the time the franchise was let that the Trust would only survive if it secured substantial savings. The Comptroller and Auditor General's 2012 report highlighted that the savings projected in Circle's bid were unprecedented as a percentage of annual turnover in the NHS.

Download or read book HC 893 Public Health England s Grant to Local Authorities written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2015 with total page 21 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since it was created in 2013, Public Health England (PHE) has made a good start in its efforts to protect and improve public health. Good public health is vital to tackling health inequalities and reducing burdens on the NHS. The Committee were impressed by the passion shown by PHE's Chief Executive, and his determination to challenge Government to consider public health in wider policymaking. However, we are concerned that the Department of Health is not getting local authorities to their target funding allocations for public health quickly enough, with nearly one third of 152 local authorities currently receiving funding that is more than 20% above or below what would be their fair share. The Agency decided not to change the grant distribution for 2015/16. Local authorities are also presently constrained by being tied into contracts to which the Department had previously committed, such as for sexual health interventions. It is not clear whether the public health grant to local authorities will remain ring-fenced, and they need more certainty to better plan their public health programmes. If the ring-fence is removed, there is a risk that spending on public health will decline as councils come under increasing financial pressures. There are still unacceptable health inequalities across the country, for example healthy life expectancy for men ranges from 52.5 years to 70 years depending on where they live. These inequalities make PHE's support at a local level particularly important but the Committee are concerned that PHE does not have strong enough ways of influencing local authorities to ensure progress against all of its top public health priorities. Finally, given how important it is to tackle the many wider causes of poor public health, PHE needs to influence departments more effectively and translate its own passion into action across Whitehall.

Download or read book HC 1045 Major Projects Report 2014 and the Equipment Plan 2014 to 2024 and Reforming Defence Acquisition written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2015 with total page 21 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Committee welcomes the progress made by the Ministry of Defence in getting to grips with its budget and military equipment costs. The affordability of the Department's 10-year plan for buying and supporting equipment is, however, dependent on it: continuing to control cost increases in existing equipment projects; delivering ambitious project cost savings over the next 10 years in order to balance its budget; and having the right skills in place to ensure that the assumptions made in its plans are robust and deliverable. Failure to improve the skills of Defence Equipment and Support (DEandS), which buys and maintains military equipment, will undermine the Department's efforts to improve control over its finances. The Department agrees that DEandS is over-reliant on expensive contractors and DEandS is spending a further £250 million on contractors over the next three and a half years to determine how it will address this and secure the skills needed to deliver the Equipment Plan within the assumed budget and to time. There remain risks to the success of the Department's Army 2020 programme designed to reduce the size of the regular Army and increase the number of trained Army reserves. The Department has not yet addressed the Committee's previous recommendations to develop credible contingency plans in the event that it cannot recruit the number of regular and reserve soldiers it requires. While the Department is reporting progress against its recruitment targets, it does acknowledge that targets beyond 2016 will be challenging and require significant improvements in performance.

Download or read book HC 1141 The Work of the Committee of Public Accounts 2010 15 written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2015 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report summarises the key areas of the Committee's work over the past five years. It draws out the areas where progress has been made and where their successors might wish to press in future. The Committee has assiduously followed the taxpayer's pound wherever it was spent. Since 2010 they held 276 evidence sessions and published 244 unanimous reports to hold government to account for its performance. 88% of their recommendations were accepted by departments. In many cases they successfully secured substantial changes, for example with the once secret tax avoidance industry. They secured consensus from government and from industry that private providers of public services do have a duty of care to the taxpayer, and in pushing the protection of whistleblowers further up the agenda of all government departments. By drawing attention to mistakes in the Department for Transport's procurement of the West Coast Mainline, more recent procurements for Crossrail, Thameslink and Intercity Express have all benefited from more expert advice and a more appropriate level of challenge from senior staff. After discovery in 2012-13 that 63% of calls to government call centres were to higher rate telephone numbers, the Government accepted our recommendation that telephone lines serving vulnerable and low income groups never be charged above the geographic rate and that 03 numbers should be available for all government telephone lines. They also secured a commitment to close large mental health hospitals.

Download or read book HC 737 Strategic Flood Risk Management written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2015 with total page 21 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Given financial constraints, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Environment Agency have done a good job in improving the cost effectiveness of their approach to flood risk management. They have adopted rational methods to prioritise spending on both new capital flood defences and maintaining existing ones. However, risks remain to the sustainability of current levels of flood protection. The Agency will need to make difficult decisions about how it prioritises its maintenance budget, including some defences where it will need to reduce or stop maintenance. In these cases, there is a risk that lack of maintenance will mean that capital costs are incurred sooner, when defences require replacement earlier. Since our evidence session, the Agency has published a long term investment strategy, which presents a number of flooding scenarios and outlines how much funding would be needed to protect against these.

Download or read book HC 809 Children in Care written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2015 with total page 25 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Department for Education should set out how it will lead and work with others to improve the outcomes for children by improving the quality of care according to the Committee's report. The Department for Education holds policy responsibility for children in care, and has national oversight of the local authorities who provide the services for these children. Although the Department is clearly best placed to provide the leadership required in many cases, it shows an alarming reluctance to play an active role in securing better services and outcomes for children in care. It chooses to limit its role to passing legislation, publishing guidance and intervening after Ofsted has failed a local authority service. It does far too little to disseminate actively what works and to support authorities to improve before they are failed by Ofsted. It sits on a wealth of information and knowledge which it fails to use in an active way to support better outcomes for this most vulnerable group of children. While 62% of children in care have suffered abuse and neglect, too many still do not get the right placement first time, too many are moved too often, and too few are placed close to their homes.

Download or read book HC 808 Implementing Reforms to Civil Legal Aid written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2015 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ministry of Justice is on track to make a significant and rapid reduction to the amount that it spends on civil legal aid. However, it introduced major changes on the basis of no evidence in many areas, and without making good use of the evidence that it did have in other areas. It has been slow to fill the considerable gaps in its understanding, and has not properly assessed the full impact of the reforms. Almost two years after the reforms, the Ministry is still playing catch up: it does not know if those still eligible are able to access legal aid; and it does not understand the link between the price it pays for legal aid and the quality of advice being given. Moreover, the Ministry's approach to implementing the reforms has inhibited access to mediation for family law cases which can be a cost-effective alternative to court for resolving disputes. Amazingly, it failed to foresee that removing legal aid funding for solicitors would reduce the number of referrals to family mediation. Perhaps most worryingly of all, it does not understand, and has shown little interest in, the knock-on costs of its reforms across the public sector. It therefore does not know whether the projected £300 million spending reduction in its own budget is outweighed by additional costs elsewhere. The Department therefore does not know whether the savings in the civil legal aid budget represent value for money

Download or read book Public and Social Services in Europe written by Hellmut Wollmann and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents comparative analyses and accounts of the institutional changes that have occurred to the local level delivery of public utilities and personal social services in countries across Europe. Guided by a common conceptual frame and written by leading country experts, the book pursues a “developmental” approach to consider how the public/municipal sector-centred institutionalization of service delivery (climaxing in the 1970s) developed through its New Public Management-inspired and European Union market liberalization-driven restructuring of the 1980s and early 1990s. The book also discusses the most recent phase since the late 1990s, which has been marked by further marketization and privatization of service delivery on the one hand, and some return to public sector provision (“remunicipalization”) on the other. By comprising some 20 European countries, including Central East European “transformation” countries as well as the “sovereign debt”-stricken countries of Southern Europe, the chapters of this volume cover a much broader cross section of countries than other recent publications on the same subject.

Download or read book Corporate behaviour and sustainable development written by Haiyue Liu and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2023-05-09 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Financial Sustainability of Local Authorities written by Great Britain: National Audit Office and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-01-30 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Department for Communities and Local Government should work with other government departments to improve the evaluation of the impact of decisions on local authority finances and services. Local authorities have, so far, managed with reduced funding, but more are facing the challenge of avoiding financial difficulties while meeting their obligations. Central government planned at the 2010 spending review to reduce funding of local authorities by £7.6 billion (26 per cent) in real terms between April 2011 and March 2015. The effects on local authorities vary. In 2012-13, the overall reduction in spending power ranges from 1.1 per cent to 8.8 per cent. At the same time, demand for high-cost services, such as adult and children's social care, is increasing. The scope is diminishing for absorbing cost pressures through reducing other, lower cost, services given that spending on these services has already been reduced. Departments have assessed the impact of changes to local authority funding, but their approach needs to be more comprehensive in the future. The accountability framework for addressing widespread financial failure in local government is untested. Where there have been one-off failures requiring central government intervention, the failure regime has managed to resolve them. It is not known how the system would respond in the case of multiple financial failures in more challenging times for local authorities.

Download or read book The United Nations world water development report 2020 written by UNESCO World Water Assessment Programme and published by UNESCO Publishing. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 2020 edition of the WWDR, titled 'Water and Climate Change' illustrates the critical linkages between water and climate change in the context of the broader sustainable development agenda. Supported by examples from across the world, it describes both the challenges and opportunities created by climate change, and provides potential responses - in terms of adaptation, mitigation and improved resilience - that can be undertaken by enhancing water resources management, attenuating water-related risks, and improving access to water supply and sanitation services for all in a sustainable manner. It addresses the interrelations between water, people, environment and economics in a changing climate, demonstrating how climate change can be a positive catalyst for improved water management, governance and financing to achieve a sustainable and prosperous world for all. The report provides a fact-based, water-focused contribution to the knowledge base on climate change. It is complementary to existing scientific assessments and designed to support international political frameworks, with the goals of helping the water community tackle the challenges of climate change, and informing the climate change community about the opportunities that improved water management offers in terms of adaptation and mitigation.