Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 25
25
We were concerned that the Department should have identified these lessons when it supported businesses...
Conclusion
We were concerned that the Department should have identified these lessons when it supported businesses in the 2008 Financial Crisis. In 2010, the NAO’s report on the Department’s support to business during a recession concluded that the “impact [of the Department’s response to the financial crisis] could have been improved by thinking through how it might respond at an earlier stage”.65 We asked the Department whether more preparation could have been done for a situation such as the pandemic, and why there had not appeared to be the degree of forward planning or contingency planning that would have proved useful. The Department explained it was able to apply some contingency plans from its preparation for a no-deal exit from the European Union. However, neither the Department nor the Bank foresaw the desperate situation that the economy found itself in as a result of the pandemic, and they maintained that it was not something government would have planned for.66 The Bank, however, recognised that it would have been in a better starting position for delivering loans if it had invested in data management and IT infrastructure earlier.67 The Department acknowledged that ‘corporate memory’ was a challenge, and we welcome the Department’s planned evaluation of the Scheme to draw lessons learnt. However, neither the Department nor the Bank provided any plans on how it intends to share the lessons-learned across government.68
Government Response
Not Addressed
HM Government
Not Addressed
7: PAC conclusion: The Department has not yet identified how it will share the lessons from the Scheme. 7a: PAC recommendation: The Department and The Bank should establish a strategy on how it intends to share lessons from the scheme within a month of the publication of their first evaluation report. 7.1 The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Target implementation date: Summer 2022 7.2 In its Treasury Minute response to the Committee's Twenty-Sixth Report of the Session 2021-22, the department agreed to work in conjunction with HM Treasury and the Bank to produce a report covering lessons learned across the COVID-19 loan guarantee schemes, which it intends to do by Summer 2022.