Download or read book Public Accounts Committee 50th Report Financial Sustainability of Local Authorities written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Committee of Public Accounts and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Public Accounts Committee 26th Report Financial Sustainability of Local Authorities written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Committee of Public Accounts and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Public Accounts Committee 26th Report Financial Sustainability of Local Authorities written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Committee of Public Accounts and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Public Accounts Committee 49th Report Financial Sustainability of Schools written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Committee of Public Accounts and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Treasury Minutes written by Great Britain. HM Treasury and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 59 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 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 Financialization and Local Statecraft written by Andy Pike and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-24 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The UK government reduced expenditure and introduced local financial self-sufficiency in pursuing austerity after the 2008 crash, forcing local governments in England to find savings and new income sources to close funding gaps. As new financial strategies and practices were devised, 'councillors at the casino' were characterized as taking risks with local taxpayers' money and jeopardizing local public service provision. Looking beyond the high-profile cases in an internationally resonant local public sector reform laboratory, Financialization and Local Statecraft examines the wider landscape across local government in England since 2010, which comprises a local tier of over 300 governments managing £100bn of revenue expenditure, employing almost 1.5 million people, and providing services to over 56 million people across the country. Andy Pike draws on a new local statecraft theory to explain how local statecrafters act in realms including financial strategies and risks, external advice, borrowing and debt management, and in and out-of-area activities. The framework reveals and accounts for their vanguard, intermediate, and long tail approaches with differing engagements with financialization. While limited within the overall landscape, such relations and UK government policy are rewiring and rescaling local statecraft and relocating risks and uncertainties onto local government and the wider local state. UK government policy and the extension and intensification of financialization expose the local state's financial sustainability and resilience in the longer term. They raise fundamental questions about what local government is for and how it should be funded. The erosion of local accountability of local statecraft in financialization risks creating a de-politicized and post-democratic local governance.
Download or read book Social Policy Review 32 written by Rees, James and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2020-07-08 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading experts in the field present an up-to-date and diverse review of the best in social policy scholarship over the past year. This volume considers current issues and critical debates in the UK and the international social policy field. It contains vital research on race in social policy higher education and analyses how welfare states and policies address the economic and social hardship of young people. The contributors also consider the impacts of austerity on the welfare state, homelessness, libraries and other social policy areas. Published in association with the Social Policy Association, this comprehensive volume will be of interest to students and academics in social policy, social welfare and related disciplines.
Download or read book Treasury minutes on the fifty second to the fifty fifth and on the fifty seventh to the sixty first reports from the Committee of Public Accounts Session 2010 12 written by Great Britain. Treasury and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-02-27 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The reports published as HC 1398 (ISBN 9780215561848), HC1469 (ISBN 9780215561862), HC 1468 (ISBN 9780215038548), HC 1502 ((9780215038585), HC 1530 (ISBN 9780215038913, HC 1565 (ISBN 9780215039910), HC 1444 (ISBN 9780215038968), HC 1566 (9780215039941), HC 1531 (9780215040077)
Download or read book HC 941 Establishing Free Schools written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2014-05-09 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent high-profile failures demonstrate that the Department for Education and the Education Funding Agency's oversight arrangements for free schools are not yet working effectively. The Department and Agency have set up an approach to oversight which emphasises schools' autonomy, but standards of financial management and governance in some free schools are clearly not up to scratch. The Agency relies on high levels of compliance by schools, yet fewer than half of free schools submitted their required financial returns for 2011-12 to the Agency on time. Whistleblowers played a major role in uncovering recent scandals when problems should have been identified through the Agency's monitoring processes. There is also concern that applications for new free schools are not emerging from areas of greatest forecast need for more and better school places. The Department needs to set out how, and by when, it will encourage applications from areas with a high or severe forecast need for extra schools places, working with local authorities where appropriate. The Department should also be more open about the reasons for making decisions. Capital costs of the free school programme are escalating. The most recent round of approved free schools had a greater proportion of more expensive types, such as secondaries, special and alternative provision, located in more expensive regions such as London, the South East and South West. If this mix of approved free schools continues, there is a risk of costs exceeding available funding.
Download or read book Fifty seventh Report of the Public Accounts Committee written by New South Wales. Parliament. Legislative Assembly. Public Accounts Committee and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book HC 1060 The Ministry of Defence Rquipment Plan 2013 23 and Major Projects Report 2013 written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are still concerns over whether the MoD's Equipment Plan is affordable. The Ministry underspent by a huge £1.2 billion on the Equipment Plan in 2012-13. Yet it has no idea whether this is because of genuine savings or whether costs are simply being stored up for later years because of delays on projects. This underspending makes it tempting for the Treasury to take them as savings at the expense of the defence equipment capabilities our armed services need. The MoD also does not properly understand the costs of maintenance and technical support, despite the fact that such support costs, £87 billion over ten years, and accounts for over half of the spend on the Equipment Plan budget. It also does not know whether its contingency of £4.7 billion is a sufficient buffer against risks to the Plan. The affordability of the Equipment Plan is heavily reliant on achieving significant savings in some of its major programmes. For example, the MoD has assumed savings of over £2 billion in two large programmes, the Complex Weapons and Submarine Enterprise Performance Programmes, but achieving these will be a challenge. Any changes to these two programmes could jeopardise the expected savings and so put affordability at risk. Project teams do not yet have enough staff with the right skills to employ proper cost and risk management techniques. Treasury and Cabinet Office should look across Government at skills shortages and go for solutions that do not require bureaucratic reorganisations to recruit skilled people at market rates.
Download or read book HC 1114 Probation Landscape Review written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2014-05-20 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ministry of Justice is implementing wholesale changes to how rehabilitation services for offenders are delivered in England and Wales on a highly ambitious timescale. It intends to introduce new private and voluntary providers, bring in a payment by results system, create a new National Probation Service and extend the service to short-term prisoners in a very short time period. This is very challenging and this report sets out a number of risks that need to be managed. The probation service in England and Wales supervised 225,000 offenders in our communities during 2012-13, at a cost of £853 million. The service is currently delivered by 35 Probation Trusts which are independent Non-Departmental Public Bodies, reporting directly to the National Offender Management Service. As part of the Ministry's Transforming Rehabilitation reforms, the Trusts will cease to operate from 31 May 2014 and will be abolished shortly afterwards, to be replaced by a National Probation Service and 21 Community Rehabilitation Companies. The scale, complexity and pace of the reforms give rise to risks around value for money which need to be carefully managed. The Committee welcomes the Accounting Officer's assurances that the Ministry will not proceed with the arrangements unless it is safe to do so. The Ministry expects the new National Probation Service and the 21 Community Rehabilitation Companies to begin operating from 1 June 2014 with only a limited opportunity for parallel running of the new arrangements during April and May 2014. The movement of staff, records and implementation of the arrangements required to make the new structures operate are ongoing. Initially the Community Rehabilitation Companies will be in public ownership pending a share sale, expected in time to launch a payment by results mechanism in 2015.
Download or read book HC 1115 The Criminal Justice System written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2014-05-20 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Criminal Justice System is complex and to operate effectively relies on numerous interdependencies between the different bodies involved. There are weaknesses in the System which have persisted for far too long and which cause delay and inefficiency, and serve to undermine public confidence. One example is the failure to ensure the right information is available in case files, where the quality has consistently worsened; another is that a quarter of trials are cancelled or delayed because of late decisions by one or more of the agencies involved. The Home Office, Ministry of Justice and Crown Prosecution Service have made some efforts to improve, but progress in addressing the key problems remains disappointingly slow. Crime has fallen but the Departments gave little evidence linking this improvement to their actions, and while both crime and police officer numbers are down, prison numbers have remained static over the same period. The Departments' efforts to improve efficiency are taking place against a background of reduced resources and staffing, and a prison population twice as high as 20 years ago. The Departments are struggling to: improve the smooth passage of criminal cases through the System; achieve greater collaboration and efficiency between criminal justice organisations at local level; and improve the use of new technology for sharing information.
Download or read book Achieving Sustainable Development and Promoting Development Cooperation written by Department of Economic & Social Affairs and published by United Nations Publications. This book was released on 2008 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an overview of the key debates that took place during the Economic and Social Council meetings at the 2007 High-level Segment, at which ECOSOC organized its first biennial Development Cooperation Forum. The discussions also revolved around the theme of the second Annual Ministerial Review, "Implementing the internationally agreed goals and commitments in regard to sustainable development."--P. 4 of cover.
Download or read book Regional Development Agencies and the Local Democracy Economic Development and Construction Bill Oral and written evidence written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Business and Enterprise Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2009 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Regional Development Agencies and the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill : Fourth Report of Session 2008-2009
