Recommendation 7

The Cabinet Office failed to bring together how risks were identified and managed across the portfolio of programmes for implementing health measures at the border. We have repeatedly found that the pandemic has exposed limitations in how government manages risks, especially those that cut across institutional boundaries. Government organised its cross-border travel measures as a portfolio of seven separate programmes across separate departments with central coordination, rather than as one cross-government programme. There was no central governance or oversight of the portfolio, and we are not convinced that the Cabinet Office adequately ensured that the portfolio and its constituent programmes balanced the competing objectives of protecting health and protecting the economy. And we are not convinced that the Cabinet Office applied the principles of risk management, that are set out in the government’s Orange Book, to the traffic light system. In accordance with good practice, we would expect to see data dashboards and risk registers that bring together the risks from the various departmental programmes in one place to inform ministerial decision-making. Recommendation: The Cabinet Office should produce, within six months, guidance to accompany the Orange Book setting out how cross-government portfolios of programmes should aggregate and manage risks at a portfolio-level so that effective whole-system governance processes are in place. To the same timescale, it should review whether other cross-government portfolios have effective whole-system governance and risk management processes in place. Managing cross-border travel during the COVID-19 pandemic 9 1 Implementing cross-border travel measures