Recommendation 15

The NAO found that while government implemented controls through both its committee structures and individual departmental programmes, it had not set out risks for the overall system of border measures in one place. It found that government had not adopted system-level good practice such as risk registers, regular data dashboards or metrics to measure and assess success so as to bring together information about cross- border travel in one place.26 We wanted to understand how the Cabinet Office had ensured the traffic light system had put good risk management or central oversight in place that would allow it to adequately balance the competing objectives of protecting the health and the economy, so we asked why the measures were not managed as a single programme with a single risk register. The Cabinet Office said that there was central government co- ordination from the COVID-19 taskforce which monitored the programmes alongside 40 other programmes that tackled COVID-19 and which needed to ‘interlink’ with each other.27