Recommendation 9

Both the Ministry and HMPPS told us that they had learnt lessons from weaknesses in governance and scrutiny in the programme. The Ministry explained that a lack of scrutiny can be the nature of big departments with a small corporate centre and multiple agencies. Often project teams did not know at what point issues should be escalated as tolerances had not been explicitly agreed. The Ministry told us that recent work in both the Ministry and HMPPS had improved governance, risk controls and thresholds for escalation. The Ministry explained that it had introduced additional governance for its portfolio of major projects and programmes with a whole-life cost of at least £30 million. This additional governance included a delivery board and thresholds on affordability, delivery timetables, benefits slippage and risks and issues.16 The consequences of relying on legacy systems