Recommendation 5

The Department has yet to set out how it is learning lessons from managing its COVID-19 business support schemes to better protect taxpayers’ money Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy Annual Report and Accounts 2020–21 7 in future. The Department now has two years’ worth of experience designing, implementing, and managing COVID-19 business support schemes, and some experience of recovery activities where fraud and error has been identified. It has identified some learning that, for example, has allowed it to refine its approach to identifying fraud and error in COVID-19 business support grants. However, this is to reduce shortcomings in existing schemes, and we would expect to see the Department demonstrating that it is learning wider lessons from these schemes which it could then apply to improve its stewardship of public funds in the future. Several of the Department’s major areas of expenditure in the coming years, such as supporting public sector decarbonisation and achieving net zero, will again require routing taxpayer funds through third parties as it did with COVID-19 business support schemes. We would expect lessons the Department has learned during the pandemic to support the design and delivery of these future schemes. Recommendation: The Department should continue to refine its estimates of the levels of fraud and error across its COVID-19 business support schemes, recovering monies to reduce losses to the public purse and apply any lessons learned from these to future support schemes. It should write to the Committee before the end of the year to set out how it is applying lessons learned in its ongoing activities.