Recommendation 19

The first wave of grant schemes in spring 2020 were largely untargeted. They account for around half of the £22.6 billion eventually provided to businesses under these schemes over the pandemic.38 HM Treasury told us the amount paid out in the first wave was very large; it was fiscally very difficult and it reduced its ability to fund other things later on.39 DBT’s Accounting Officer reflected that to some extent teams in the department had needed to do their best at very hard jobs, under incredible pressure, without sufficient capacity or access to the right skills. This reflected that BEIS was traditionally a policy rather than a delivery department with, for example, a very small counter-fraud team.40 HM Treasury said that later in the pandemic the government sought to move to more targeted schemes, to improve value for money.41 However, the demands of doing this in the second half of 2020 overwhelmed the capacity of the officials in charge of the grant schemes within BEIS. No more than 20 people were working on the grants in the early stages of the pandemic. This was the period of most frequent revision of guidance and related documents, which DBT linked to “the desire at that point to have more nuanced interventions.”42