Recommendation 17

HM Treasury’s guidance states that an AO assessment should be produced for a programme or project if, after its initial approval, it ‘departs from the four standards [for accounting officers] or the agreed plan […] in terms of costs, benefits, timescales, or level of risk, which informed the accounting officer’s previous approval’.50 While the guidance is not prescriptive about what this means in practice, IPA told the NAO that this could be interpreted as a substantial change to a programme’s business case which alters HM Treasury’s approvals.51 The NAO found that departments consider whether a programme has undergone a significant changes in different ways. Of the 227 programmes on the GMPP at 31 December 2021, 27 might reasonably be considered to have changed significantly.52 HM Treasury told us it was following up on the 27 to get a complete record of the AO assessments which should be published.53