As a member of the Public Accounts Committee, every week I hear tales of government financial waste that would boil the blood of the most frivolous of spendthrifts.
In recent months, we have seen an extra £1bn diverted into the expansion of academies programme at the expense of struggling schools. We have a £3.4bn stockpile of supplies the MoD no longer needs, while the cancellation of the InterCity West Coast franchise competition cost the taxpayer at least £50m.
All these individual headaches certainly don’t help to quell the migraine that is keeping a tight rein on spending. In a bid to help and to understand the bigger picture, we now have access to the Whole of Government Accounts, albeit 19 months out of date.
The PAC discovered that once this document has been produced, the departmental boards – the government’s key vehicle for control and planning – don’t review it. We have a document that could inform budgets across the board and save millions lining bins in Whitehall.
The National Audit Office expanded on this theme in their study into integration across government. Only a quarter of the future activity proposed in departmental business plans mention joint working with other departments, while six departments described themselves as ‘weak’ at collaborative working.
The Institute for Government’s latest report on Financial Leadership for Government looks into this state of affairs, and exposes a Government machine that needs a second look; a system whose concept of joined-up thinking leaves much to be desired.
The fifteen departments of Whitehall, isolated from each other’s scrutiny, are beholden to their own methods of balancing the books. While the Treasury has a strong hand on the tiller when it comes to spending control, they have limited say over spending and planning within departments.
Variance in spending reviews and the changing political faces of policy mean it may be difficult to create a more uniform approach to budgeting, it is true. But when the current structure means the concept of ‘best practice’ is an alien one and smarter spending is only driven by the need for savings in a particular portfolio’s budget, then more needs to be done.
This is not an unrealistic goal either. The report demonstrate that the US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada all have a central financial figure that at the very least has some input into departmental decision making and performance management.
As the IfG report asserts, the concept of not having such a centralised figure would be unthinkable to a global conglomerate or any large business. I would suggest that Whitehall could have much to learn from their private compatriots – or the team working diligently just down the road.
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Nick Smith is MP for Blaenau Gwent and a member of the Progress strategy board. He tweets @BlaenauGwentMP
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