Recommendation 5

We do not yet know the impact achieved by the £22.6 billion provided to businesses, or how much money was spent that might not have been needed. Government set up grant schemes knowing that they would provide too much to some businesses and not enough to others, particularly for the earliest grants that required Ministerial Directions to authorise them. We know the cost of the schemes, but DBT is still waiting for the results of an evaluation that is trying to measure how far they met the government’s objectives to protect businesses and employment. HM Treasury told us it will look ‘very carefully’ at these results in relation to how choices about scheme design affected value for money. When we pressed witnesses about the trade-off between speed and controls, they acknowledged the importance of being better able to advise Ministers in future about such choices and trade-offs than they had been able to at the start of the pandemic. While HM Treasury stressed to us the importance of looking at the impact across the entirety of business support, not only grant schemes, it made no commitment to complete such an assessment of its own response. Recommendation 5: • As part of its Treasury Minute response to this report, the Department for Business and Trade should set out what it has concluded from the completed Ipsos evaluation. • HM Treasury should write to the Committee with its plans to capture and distil lessons from the experience of supporting businesses through the pandemic within three months.