Recommendation 19

This Committee reported in 2016 that government’s accountability arrangements had failed to keep pace with increasingly complex ways of delivering policies and services and that this had weakened accountability to Parliament for the use of public funds.56 Noting the long timescales and magnitude of the delivery challenge, we questioned witnesses on who was accountable for levelling up outcomes. The Department told us that levelling up was a cross-government exercise which inevitably made accountability more complicated.57 The Department explained that Cabinet Committee would be the formal mechanism for overseeing the Levelling Up work as a whole but that government was still working through accountabilities for the Levelling Up ‘missions’- in reference to the 12 ‘missions’ or Levelling Up outcomes set out in the White Paper.58