Download or read book Lessons from Cancelling the InterCity West Coast Franchise Competition written by Great Britain: National Audit Office and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-12-07 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Department for Transport competition to let the Intercity West Coast franchise lacked management oversight and the governance of the project was confused, according to the National Audit Office. The full cost to the taxpayer is unknown but likely to be significant, with at least £1.9 million in staff and adviser costs, £2.7 million in legal costs and £4.3 million on external advisers for the reviews that it has commissioned. The refranchising process was a major endeavour, with considerable complexity and uncertainty. The objectives of the Department for Transport were insufficiently clear during the franchise competition. The Department delayed the issuing of the invitation to tender by eight months because it had not finalized how it would implement recent policy changes. There was also confusion among Department staff about some aspects of the process. The subordinated loan facility was a particular area of confusion. A subordinated loan is capital provided by the parent company which guarantees franchise payments will be made to the Department should the franchisee get less passenger revenue than expected. However, there were significant errors in the tool the Department used to calculate how big a loan it would require bidders to have. The competition lacked strong project management and there was no clear route for the project team to get approval for major issues. No one person oversaw the whole process or could see patterns of emerging problems.

Download or read book Cancellation of the InterCity West Coast Franchise Competition written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Transport Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-01-31 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Embarking on an ambitious, perhaps unachievable, reform of rail franchising, in haste, on the UK's most complex piece of railway was irresponsible. Many of the problems with the franchise competition, detailed in the Laidlaw report, reflect very badly on civil servants at the DfT. However, ministers approved a complex - perhaps unworkable - franchising policy at the same time as overseeing major cuts to the Department's resources. This was a recipe for failure which the DfT must learn from urgently. While the Department has already published a response to the Laidlaw report which Mr Laidlaw described as 'very encouraging', and has initiated a review of franchise MPs warn that a number of matters remain to be adequately resolved. The Committee calls on the Secretary of State and the Department for Transport to: explain why ministers and senior officials were misled about how subordinated loan facilities were calculated, if necessary after disciplinary proceedings against staff have concluded; complete a full email capture and get to the bottom of whether or not any officials manipulated the outcome of the competition to ensure First Group were awarded the contracts; provide a comprehensive breakdown of costs arising from the cancellation of the West Coast Mainline franchise competition. The Committee also wants to establish what lessons current and future ministers must learn from this episode

Download or read book Progress in the Thameslink programme written by Great Britain: National Audit Office and published by Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-06-05 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Department for Transport has done well so far to contain the infrastructure costs for the Thameslink Programme within the original budget. Phase one of the Programme cost £1.704 billion, was completed on time and was £143 million under budget. However, delays of more than three years in agreeing the contract to buy new trains mean that delivering value for money from the Programme as a whole is at greater risk than the National Audit Office would have expected at this stage. There continues to be a robust transport case for the £3.552 billion (at 2006 prices) Programme. Thameslink services have consistently been among the most crowded London routes with passengers amongst the least satisfied with space on trains; and demand is forecast to increase. The Department estimates that the Programme will make net present benefits of £2.9 billion through reduced journey times, reduced overcrowding on trains and quicker interchanges between services. The Department needs to manage a complex interaction between completing the infrastructure project; buying new trains; and letting a new franchise. Delays to any of these projects can delay significantly or complicate delivery of other parts of the Programme. The award of the estimated £1.6 billion contract to buy new trains is currently delayed by over three years and this has implications for the rest of the programme. And until the contract is let it will not be clear whether delivery of the whole Programme by 2018 is still feasible.

Download or read book Department for Transport written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-02-26 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Department for Transport's complete lack of common sense in the way it ran the West Coast franchise competition has landed the taxpayer with a bill of £50 million at the very least. If you factor in the cost of delays to investment on the line, and the potential knock-on effect on other franchise competitions, then the final cost to the taxpayer will be very much larger. The Department made fundamental errors in calculating the level of risk capital it would require bidders to put on the table and it did not demand appropriate levels of capital from both bidders. Faced with the possibility of legal challenge, it cancelled the competition. The Department failed to learn from mistakes made in previous projects. Recommendations made in the Committee's report 'The failure of Metronet' (HC 390, session 2009-10, ISBN 9780215544216) to prevent a lack of oversight and information were clearly not applied in this competition. Cuts in staffing and in consultancy budgets contributed to a lack of key skills. There was no single person responsible from beginning to end and, therefore, no one who had to live with the consequences of bad policy decisions. For three months, there was no single person in charge at all. Not only that, there was no senior civil servant in the team responsible for the work, despite the critical importance of this multi-billion pound franchise. Given that the Department got it so wrong over this competition, there is concern over how properly it will handle future projects, including HS2 and Thameslink

Download or read book Constitutional Administrative Law written by Hilaire Barnett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-06-26 with total page 1323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hilaire Barnett’s Constitutional and Administrative Law has provided generations of students with reliable, accessible and comprehensive coverage of the Public Law syllabus. Mapped to the common course outline, it equips students with an understanding of the constitution’s past, present and future by analysing and illustrating the political and socio-historical contexts which have shaped the major legal rules and principles of public law, as well as on-going constitutional reform. The 12th edition will address key recent developments including: The referendum result on the UK’s membership of the EU and its ongoing impact on constitutional and administrative law The continuing process of devolution to the nations Terrorism and national security Future developments, particularly in relation to 'Brexit' will be discussed in regular updates to the companion website.

Download or read book High Speed 2 written by Great Britain: National Audit Office and published by Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-05-16 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this early examination of progress by the Department for Transport in planning for the High Speed 2 rail network, the National Audit Office expresses reservations about the Department's business case. The Department has poorly articulated the strategic need for a transformation in rail capacity and how High Speed 2 will help generate regional economic growth. The Department's methodology for appraising the project puts a high emphasis on journey-time savings, but the relationship between these savings and the strategic reasons for doing the project, such as rebalancing regional economies, is unclear. The benefit-cost ratio calculated for phase one has twice contained errors and the Department has been slow to carry out its own assurance of the underlying analysis. The most recent benefit-cost ratio (published in August 2012) is 1.4 to 1 but is likely to change as the ratio is sensitive to changes in data underpinning assumptions, such as GDP growth forecasts. It does not, however, reflect the Department's current assumption on the relationship between passenger numbers and GDP growth. The Department should also carry out research into how business travellers use their time on trains. HS2 Limited has also not yet analysed the effect on passenger demand, revenues and the benefit-cost ratio of charging passengers premium prices. The NAO estimates that there is a £3.3 billion funding gap over four years (2017-18 to 2020-21) which the government has yet to decide how to fill.

Download or read book Government Response to the Brown Review of the Rail Franchising Programme written by Great Britain: Department for Transport and published by IDRC. This book was released on 2013-07-11 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dated July 2013. The Brown review published as Cm. 8526 (February 2013, ISBN 9780101852623)

Download or read book Memorandum on the 2012 Civil Service Reform Plan written by Great Britain: National Audit Office and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-01-24 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The government published its Civil Service Reform Plan (the Plan) in June 2012 (www.civilservice.gov.uk/reform). It followed the publication of the 2011 Open Public Services White Paper (Cm.8145, ISBN 9780101814522) which called for a smaller, more strategic civil service that does less centrally, and commissions more from outside. The Plan has many themes in common with previous initiatives that attempted to reform the civil service, and adapt it to the changing needs of governments and public service users, but is arguably the broadest such reform programme since 1968. This Memorandum is intended primarily to inform the Committee's discussions with the leadership of the civil service about the Plan. Given that the Plan is less than a year old, it is not an evaluation of the reforms in the Plan, the progress made against them, or the implementation arrangements in place. It is designed to support the Committee to engage with the breadth of the Plan, so that they can use their influence to help ensure that its implementation improves efficiency, reinforces Parliamentary accountability and protects value for taxpayers and citizens. The Civil Service, in its present form as of 2012, employs 459,000 people across 106 departments and other bodies. The annual spend on Civil Service pay is £16 billion. The projected cost reduction for the Civil Service, between 2010 to 2015 is £80 billion and the projected reduction in the number of full-time equivalent civil servants over the same period is 110,000 representing about 23% of total staff.

Download or read book ITF Roundtable Reports Ex Post Assessment of Transport Investments and Policy Interventions written by International Transport Forum and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ex-post evaluation is important to improving the delivery of transport policy objectives. It can be used for multiple purposes at the core of which is the improvement of ex-ante assessment. A small number of jurisdictions employ ex-post evaluation systematically and leading experience is ...

Download or read book National Audit Office NAO Cross Government Infrastructure Investment The Impact on Consumer Bills Volume II HC 812 II written by Great Britain: National Audit Office and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-11-13 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Government and regulators do not know by how much overall expected new investment by the private sector in infrastructure will increase household utility bills and whether bills will be affordable. The National Audit Office has recommended that the Treasury ensure there are mechanisms to assess the cumulative impact of infrastructure investment on consumer bills. This report, which focuses on the energy, water and, to a lesser extent, telecoms sectors, recognizes that the UK requires significant investment in new infrastructure. The Treasury expects that over two-thirds of the £310 billion worth of the planned infrastructure it has identified will be privately financed, owned and operated but paid for by consumers through their utility bills. High levels of expected new investment in infrastructure mean that energy and water bills may rise significantly from current levels. The available projections suggest that increases in both energy and water bills will continue to outstrip inflation, on average, up to 2030. This is particularly concerning, given that energy and water bills have increased significantly in recent years, while incomes have not. The affordability of utility bills can be assessed only in the context of wider pressures on household expenditure, including an understanding of all household bills as well as potential trends in household incomes. There is a range of schemes to support vulnerable consumers but without a fuller understanding of affordability in the round, government and regulators cannot assess the adequacy of these schemes, now or in the future

Download or read book Gower Handbook of Programme Management written by D Lock and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-26 with total page 745 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the ten years since this Gower Handbook was first published, Programme Management has been transformed to become the vehicle of choice for realising the objectives of large scale, complicated, business, government and social investment. The Second Edition of this Gower Handbook is a completely new text; designed as a definitive guide to the current state of Programme Management. To that end the text offers foundation theory and knowledge around key issues such as, managing programme contracts, people and know-how, complexity and uncertainty, benefits and success measures, as well as every stage of the programme life cycle. The main central section of the book provides theory, tools, advice and examples of practical application from an industry context and covers sectors including construction, energy, aerospace and defence, IT, automotive and the public sector. The Handbook also includes a section with chapters on assessing and improving programme competences and developing maturity. Discrete chapters relate programme management to the international baselines and standards. Collectively, the Gower Handbook of Programme Management is most comprehensive guide to the subject that you can buy.

Download or read book Algorithmic Regulation written by Karen Yeung and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the power and sophistication of of 'big data' and predictive analytics has continued to expand, so too has policy and public concern about the use of algorithms in contemporary life. This is hardly surprising given our increasing reliance on algorithms in daily life, touching policy sectors from healthcare, transport, finance, consumer retail, manufacturing education, and employment through to public service provision and the operation of the criminal justice system. This has prompted concerns about the need and importance of holding algorithmic power to account, yet it is far from clear that existing legal and other oversight mechanisms are up to the task. This collection of essays, edited by two leading regulatory governance scholars, offers a critical exploration of 'algorithmic regulation', understood both as a means for co-ordinating and regulating social action and decision-making, as well as the need for institutional mechanisms through which the power of algorithms and algorithmic systems might themselves be regulated. It offers a unique perspective that is likely to become a significant reference point for the ever-growing debates about the power of algorithms in daily life in the worlds of research, policy and practice. The range of contributors are drawn from a broad range of disciplinary perspectives including law, public administration, applied philosophy, data science and artificial intelligence. Taken together, they highlight the rise of algorithmic power, the potential benefits and risks associated with this power, the way in which Sheila Jasanoff's long-standing claim that 'technology is politics' has been thrown into sharp relief by the speed and scale at which algorithmic systems are proliferating, and the urgent need for wider public debate and engagement of their underlying values and value trade-offs, the way in which they affect individual and collective decision-making and action, and effective and legitimate mechanisms by and through which algorithmic power is held to account.

Download or read book Tax Avoidance written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-04-26 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among those ranged against HMRC are the big four accountancy firms, Deloitte, Ernst and Young, KPMG, and PwC, which earn £2 billion each year from their tax work in the UK. They employ nearly 9,000 people just to provide tax advice aimed at minimizing the tax paid. Between them they boast 250 transfer pricing specialists whereas HMRC has only 65 people working in this area. The firms declare that their focus is now on acceptable tax planning and not aggressive tax avoidance however they continue to sell complex tax avoidance schemes with as little as 50 per cent chance of succeeding if challenged in court. The large accountancy firms are in a powerful position in the tax world and have an unhealthily cosy relationship with government. They second staff to the Treasury to advise on formulating tax legislation. When those staff return to their firms, they have the very inside knowledge and insight to be able to identify loopholes in the new legislation and advise their clients on how to take advantage of them. This is a clear conflict of interest which should be banned in a code of conduct for tax advisers. The UK must also take the lead in demanding urgent reform of international tax law, so that companies have to pay a fair share of tax where they actually do business and make profits. Furthermore, the job of simplifying our tax code needs to be taken seriously; yet the Office of Tax Simplification has just 6 people working in it

Download or read book HMRC written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-03-18 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2011-12, 20 million phone calls to HMRC were not answered. It cost the callers £136 million while they waited to speak to an adviser. And, against its target of responding to 80% of letters within 15 days, the department managed to reply to just 66%. Officials are beginning to realize that good customer service lies at the heart of any strategy to maximize revenues while cutting costs. Callers will no longer be forced to use the more expensive 0845 numbers. Other planned changes include the resolution of more queries first time and a call-back service where this is not possible. However, HMRC's new target of answering 80% of calls within five minutes is still woefully short of the industry standard of answering 80% of calls within 20 seconds. Just how the department is going to improve standards of customer service, given the prospect of its having fewer staff and receiving a higher volume of calls, is open to question. HMRC plans to cut the number of customer-facing staff by a third by 2015. At the same time, the stresses associated with introducing the Real Time Information System, Universal Credit and changes to child benefit are likely to drive up the number of phone calls to the department. HMRC is also to close all of its 281 enquiry centres which give face-to-face advice to customers. HMRC considers that it will be able to improve service standards by using its staff more flexibly. It may need to put in additional resources, though, to avoid the kind of plummeting performance we have seen in the past

Download or read book HM Treasury written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-04-11 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Whole of Government Accounts (WGA) provides the most complete picture available of government's total finances. This is the second WGA and the first to have comparative data from the previous year.The WGA shows that the annual deficit was £94.4 billion in 2010-11, a reduction of £68.3 billion from the £162.7 billion deficit in 2009-10. However, the 2010-11 accounts include a gain of £126 billion from an assumed reduction in the public sector pension liability as a result of the Government's decision to change the measure of inflation used to uprate payments to pensioners from the Retail Price Index to the Consumer Price Index with effect from 1 April 2011. Without this change, the deficit for 2010-11 would have been £220.4 billion.The WGA has potential to help the Treasury to manage the public finances more effectively but that it does not have a clear plan to realise that potential or improve the quality and timeliness of the WGA to improve its usefulness.More needs to be done to make the accounts easier to understand. Also information sufficient for a detailed analysis by region or by category of spend would make the WGA more useful. The 2010-11 WGA includes the Bank of England for the first time, but it still does not include all bodies owned and controlled by government, leading to an accountability gap. The Treasury could not provide a convincing explanation for the on-going exclusion of organisations such as the Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Banking Group and Network Rail from the WGA which, under normal accounting rules, should be included.

Download or read book Restructuring of the National Offender Management Service written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The National Offender Management Service directly manages 117 public prisons, manages the contracts of 14 private prisons, and is responsible for a prisoner population of around 86,000. It commissions and funds services from 35 probation trusts, which oversee approximately 165,000 offenders serving community sentences. For 2012-13, the Agency's budget is £3,401 million. The Agency achieved its savings targets of £230 million in 2011-12 and maintained its overall performance, despite an increase in the prison population. However, the Agency's savings targets of £246 million in 2012-13, £262 million in 2013-14 and £145 million in 2014-15 are challenging. The Agency believes it has scope to make the prison estate more efficient by closing older, more expensive prisons and investing in new ones. These plans, however, assume the prison population will stay at its current level. Furthermore, the Agency has not yet secured the up-front funding for the voluntary redundancies needed to bring down prison staffing costs. Unless overcrowding is addressed and staff continue to carry out offender management work it is increasingly likely that rehabilitation work needed to reduce the risk of prisoners reoffending will not be provided. The Agency has not done enough to address the risks to safety, decency and standards in prisons and in community services arising from staffing cuts implemented to meet financial targets. The Agency plans to increase the role of private firms and the third sector in probation but the probation trusts don't appear to have the infrastructure and skills they need to commission probation services from these providers effectively

Download or read book Managing Budgeting in Government written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-03-08 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Government needs strong budgetary systems to be able to control and manage public spending and to provide high quality public services that offer value for money to the taxpayer. The 2010 Spending Review set a four-year spending total for each department and focused on reducing public spending and delivering the coalition Government's programme. The Treasury managed the Spending Review by collating bids from departments and challenging submissions. The process built on the experience of previous CSRs and was better managed, however concerns remain. Departments and the Treasury failed to take a longer term view on spending, making cuts in those budgets that were easiest to cut. For instance, whilst Treasury improved assessment processes to be able to rank capital projects, the overall level of capital investment was cut. Resource expenditure as a whole will increase in nominal terms, albeit at a much slower rate. There were gaps in data which made it difficult to compare options or benchmark spending proposals. There were no incentives for departments to collaborate on cross-government issues. There was no evidence of clear thinking on how one decision to save money in one budget area might lead to an increase in expenditure elsewhere. Decisions on where to spend or cut rest with Ministers and cannot be divorced from the political process. But these decisions need to be informed by rational analysis. Officials must do more to provide Ministers with reliable and comparable information to help them weigh up the effect of different spending options