Download or read book Treasury Minutes on the Fifth the Eleventh to the Thirteenth and the Fifteenth to the Sixteenth Reports from the Committee of Public Accounts Session 2012 13 written by Great Britain. Treasury and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-01-21 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dated January 2013. The reports published as HC 104 (ISBN 9780215047670), HC 288 (ISBN 9780215047632), HC 532 (ISBN 9780215048684), HC 388 (ISBN 9780215048691), HC 103 (ISBN 9780215048653); HC 389 (ISBN 9780215049704)
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 2013-02-15 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Treasury acts as both the finance ministry and economic ministry but it appears to neglect its role as finance ministry. Its own accounts are impenetrable and there are many instances of poor decision making by departments, which the Treasury could and should have prevented. While staff turnover fell in 2011-12, it is still very high. Furthermore, the Treasury remains committed to cutting its headcount by a third and there are still very few women at senior levels. The support provided to banks in the last crisis helped prevent the banking system from collapse. The Treasury has successfully withdrawn nearly all of the taxpayer guarantees to banks but the taxpayer still owns some £66 billion of shares in RBS and Lloyds, a sum which is yet to be recovered. The Treasury has not convinced that it understands either the risks it has taken on by indemnifying the Bank of England against losses on Quantitative Easing or the expected economic benefits. Some £375 billion has so far been injected into the economy as an 'experiment' but the Department could not explain what the effect has been on the whole economy or on different parts of society. The National Loans Guarantee Scheme achieved just 15 per cent of its intended take-up and has now been superseded by a more generous Bank of England scheme. The Treasury needs to be clear what it wants this Bank of England scheme to achieve, and how it intends to monitor it.
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 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 Means testing written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-01-12 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Government uses means testing to distribute at least £87 billion of benefits to claimants each year, around 13% of total public spending. The poorest fifth of households rely on means-tested benefits for a third of their net income. The planned introduction of a new means-tested Universal Credit will replace a number of existing means-tested benefits. Currently 30 different means tested benefits are managed by nine departments and 152 local authorities in England. But Departments have a limited understanding of how their design of benefits affects incentives for employment, the burden on claimants, take-up and administrative costs. Departments need to improve their understanding of how all benefits interact and how changes to eligibility rules can affect claimants. Complexity increases the burden on claimants which can harm take-up, and is likely to disadvantage the most vulnerable members of society in particular. The Government expects Universal Credit reforms to simplify the system and improve incentives to find work. The DWP's priority is to focus on the effective delivery of these reforms. However, success will also depend on proper coordination between Universal Credit and other means-tested benefits. In addition, DWP and HMRC are designing a real-time information (RTI) system for Universal Credit to reduce the risk of overpayments, with benefits being recalculated as soon as circumstances change. Both DWP and HMRC need to understand how the introduction of this system will impact on small businesses and the self-employed who may not have the necessary IT to administer it.
Download or read book Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-05-18 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Around half of all children in the UK from separated families are being brought up in poverty. In 2010-11 the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission collected and transferred £1.1 billion to parents caring for more than 880,000 children. Nevertheless significant, all too familiar and recurring challenges remain: parents are frustrated with the standard of support received from the Commission. Maintenance payments totalling some £3.7 billion are outstanding, but the Commission estimates that only £1 billion of this is collectable; and costs remain high. The Commission also faces further significant challenges in introducing its new child maintenance scheme. In particular, it will need to respond to substantial cost reductions and successfully implement a new system of charging fees to parents who choose to use the Commission's services. The Commission needs to deliver acceptable standards of service at a reasonable cost. The new child maintenance scheme should improve efficiency, but further changes are needed to streamline existing processes. The Commission has to deliver cost reductions of £117 million by 2014-15 and its plans are currently £16 million short of this target. Its cost reduction plans depend in part on a new IT system which is already late. To meet the current timetable critical testing will have to be undertaken in parallel with development work, mirroring poor practices that have contributed to the failure of a number of government IT projects. Each month of delay will increase the Commission's costs by at least £3 million and may delay planned income from fees.
Download or read book Flood risk management in England written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Flood protection is a national priority and features on the National Risk Register of Civil Emergencies. Recently the annual cost of flood damage has been £1.1 billion, and 5.2 million homes are at risk of flooding. In 2010-11 the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (the Department) spent £664 million on flood and coastal risk management, 95% of which went to the Environment Agency (the Agency). In 2009 the Agency projected that its flood risk management budget needed to rise by 9% during the spending review period (2011-12 to 2014-15) to sustain current levels of protection. However during the same period the Agency's flood risk management budget has been reduced by over 10%. The Department wants to increase local authority and private contributions, but expecting an increase in local authority contributions when their resources are reducing may well be over-optimistic. The Committee was very concerned that the Department did not accept ultimate responsibility for managing the risk of floods. The Department also needs more reliable information to inform its decisions on when and where to intervene if local risk management plans are inadequate. The Agency needs to improve how it involves local communities in the decision-making process. The agreement between the Department and the insurance industry that insurance cover will be provided to households at risk of flooding ends in 2013. In some areas premiums appear to have risen as a result of growing uncertainty over local levels of protection, so an early revised agreement is needed.
Download or read book The BBC s efficiency programme written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-03-06 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BBC's efficiency Programme : Seventy-third report of session 2010-12, report, together with formal minutes, oral and written Evidence
Download or read book The Stationery Office Annual Catalogue written by Stationery Office (Great Britain) and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 574 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Stationery Office Annual Catalogue 2011 written by Stationery Office and published by . This book was released on 2012-04-12 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Stationery Office annual catalogue 2011 provides a comprehensive source of bibliographic information on over 4900 Parliamentary, statutory and official publications - from the UK Parliament, the Northern Ireland Assembly, and many government departments and agencies - which were issued in 2011.
Download or read book The Ministry of Justice s Language Service Contract written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-12-14 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before January 2012, the Ministry generally booked interpretation services directly with individual interpreters, many of whom were listed on the National Register of Public Service Interpreters (NRPSI). This approach was administratively inefficient and the Ministry decided to set up a new centralised procurement system. The Ministry awarded the contract to a company, ALS, that was clearly incapable of delivering. Despite having been warned that ALS was too small to shoulder a contract worth more than £1 million, it went ahead and handed them an annual £42 million national contract. The Ministry did not understand its own basic requirements and ignored the views of interpreters, who had serious concerns about the contract. Capita took over ALS in late 2011. The Ministry needed access to 1,200 interpreters when the contract went live but the company had only 280 properly assessed interpreters willing to work for it. The Ministry, though, still decided to go live nationally in one go. Many of the 'interpreters' it thought were available had simply registered an interest on the company's website and had been subject to no official checks. As a result, the company was able to meet only 58% of bookings causing a sharp rise in delayed, postponed and abandoned trials; individuals being kept on remand solely because no interpreter was available; and the quality of interpreters has at times been appalling. However Capita has only been fined £2,200 to date for failing to meet the terms of the contract. Capita-ALS is now fulfilling more bookings, but it is still struggling
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 Funding for Local Transport written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-02-05 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Department for Transport works with local partners to deliver many of its policies. Local authorities play a key role in planning and commissioning transport services, such as bus and light rail, and providing and maintaining roads and other local infrastructure. They spent a total of £8.5 billion on transport in 2010-11. The Department provided around a quarter of this (£2.2 billion), with the rest raised locally from council tax, from the £411 million surplus raised from parking levies, or from the Department for Communities and Local Government formula grant. In 2011-12 the Department provided £1.2 billion to local authorities for highways maintenance and small transport projects in the form of two un-ringfenced formula-based grants. The Department does not monitor how un-ringfenced grants are spent and there is insufficient information to determine the impact of the Department's contribution on local authorities' spending decisions and therefore to achieving the Department's objectives. The Department plans to devolve more control over its funding to the local level (raising the proportion of resources which are not ringfenced portion from 60% to around 80%); and new local transport bodies will take on some decision-making responsibilities previously held centrally. Full details of how the new system will work are still to be determined and there is uncertainty over how the arrangements will work in practice.
Download or read book Department of Energy and Climate Change written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-01-14 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is estimated that offshore wind farms have the potential to contribute 8-15% of electricity by 2020. This will require a large investment in offshore infrastructure, including around £8 billion of investment in transmission assets (offshore platforms, cables and onshore substations). An elaborate regime that licences operators of offshore electricity transmission assets following competitions has been introduced. The aim was to develop a competitive market for offshore electricity transmission but the reality is that the first six licences were won by just two companies. Furthermore, the terms of the transmission licences awarded so far appear heavily skewed towards attracting investors rather than securing a good deal for consumers. The transmission operators receive their income from the National Grid which recovers its costs from electricity suppliers and generators. Future payments to licensees are estimated at around £17 billion, and this will ultimately be funded by customers who could well end up paying higher electricity prices. The investors' estimated returns of 10-11% on the initial licences look extremely generous given the limited risks the investors bear. Licensees are guaranteed a fully retail price index-linked income for 20 years regardless of the extent to which assets are used. Yet penalties are limited to 10% of expected income in any one year if the operators fail to provide the transmission facilities when required. Despite the lessons from the PFI market the Government has failed to ensure that gains secured, for example, from debt refinancing are shared
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
Download or read book Excess Votes in 2011 12 written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-02-07 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Congressional Record written by United States. Congress and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 1324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
