Recommendation 13

During this time, the House Administrations also worked to transition from the former Sponsor Body into the R&R Client Team. We have previously highlighted the risk that delays to changing the programme governance, and continuing uncertainty, could lead to a loss of vital capability from within the Sponsor Body and Delivery Authority.29 The Clerks had committed to work on retaining and recruiting the staff it needed, with Sponsor Body staff being TUPE’d across.30 Although the House Administrations have made progress bringing the Sponsor body staff ‘in-house’, the reset resulted in the entire leadership team of the Sponsor Body leaving.31 In terms of filling these gaps, the programme SRO told us that success recruiting to a number of roles, such as business case director and Head of Risk, had been mixed. She described it as not being easy to fill these roles, with some feedback that people had been put off by the uncertain and political nature of the programme.32 However, the Delivery Authority Chief Executive told us that although he had been very concerned that, given the programme’s change in direction, people would leave, he was pleased this risk had not materialised. He highlighted though that the risk was still there.33