Source · Select Committees · Treasury Committee
Recommendation 5
5
Paragraph: 59
As the crisis moves beyond full lock-down, it is important to effectively target assistance to...
Recommendation
As the crisis moves beyond full lock-down, it is important to effectively target assistance to those businesses and individuals who need it. The ability of labour to move from sector to sector will not be a painless process and will be dependent on the growth of sectors matching the shrinkage of sectors. The Government should set out how it will manage the transition to mitigate the crisis and prevent exacerbating further inequalities that undermine the “levelling up” agenda.
Paragraph Reference:
59
Government Response
Acknowledged
HM Government
Acknowledged
With regards to your recommendation on levelling up, the government is committed to levelling up opportunity in every region and nation of the UK and levelling up represents a common priority across departments, both in what they do and how they do it. For example, the government intends to establish a new approach to link departments’ spending proposals to the outcomes they intend to achieve as part of a new Public Value Framework (PVF). HMT announced at Budget 2020 that the government is currently developing the medium- to long-term priority outcomes that it is seeking to deliver for priorities such as levelling-up, as well as the metrics that will be used to measure and improve performance against these outcomes. The government also intends to make decisions differently: for example, we are currently undertaking a review of the Green Book, and at Budget 2020, the Government committed to relocating 22,000 civil service roles from London and the Southeast to the rest of the UK by 2030. On your recommendation regarding the OBR’s role in monitoring levelling-up, the OBR have a clearly defined mandate, outlined in the Budget Responsibility and National Audit Act 2011. As part of this, the OBR’s responsibilities are examining and reporting on the sustainability of the public finances at a national level although they do undertake work on a sub-national level; they publish devolved tax and spending forecasts alongside each of their main UK forecasts and provide the Welsh Government with independent scrutiny of its forecasts in the Welsh taxes outlook. There have been three reviews of the OBR to