Recommendation 15

We questioned the Department on the nature and timing of the role for Ministers in making final decisions for the Levelling Up Fund.40 The NAO’s report explains that following an initial pass/fail gateway, officials scored and ranked bids against published criteria and then passed a shortlist of the highest scoring bids to Ministers. Ministers then made final decisions, taking into account the scores as assessed by officials though the process allowed them some discretion in how bids met a pre-defined list of ‘other considerations’.41 The Department explained that Ministers made decisions about how much money to allocate; what score threshold to apply and what the balance of investment across the three themes of the Levelling Up Fund would be.42 We acknowledged that some decisions would always be taken subjectively by Ministers but wanted to understand how much discretion they had.43 We wanted to understand if Ministers had decided on the principles for awarding funding only after they knew who, from the 170 shortlisted bidders, would win and who would not as a result of those principles.44 HM Treasury told us after the evidence session that Ministers had seen a high level summary of all eligible bids prior to shortlisting but that they made decisions from a shortlist that had been locked down. The Department told us that none of the scores changed as a consequence of ministerial decision-making. It pointed us to the explanatory note which, it said, laid out the detail of how Ministers made their decisions.45 The explanatory note implies a single discussion in which Ministers discussed the shortlist and determined principles for award.46 However, the Department did not publish sufficient information for us to determine, as we would expect in the interests of openness and transparency, how much discretion Ministers had. For example, it did not publish lists of shortlisted or unsuccessful bidders, neither did it publish any information on how the Department had scored