Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 5
5
In our evidence session on 17th November 2021, we observed that the cost tracker had...
Conclusion
In our evidence session on 17th November 2021, we observed that the cost tracker had supported Parliamentary scrutiny of departments and enabled us to hold government to account.9 We have found the model used in the cost tracker very useful, and it has helped in the ongoing exercise of monitoring COVID-19 spending.10 We asked HM Treasury whether it planned to use a similar model to the cost tracker in future to track other areas of spending. HM Treasury told us that it was still looking at whether it would 5 The COVID-19 cost tracker, available at: COVID-19 cost tracker - National Audit Office (NAO) 6 Committee of Public Accounts, COVID-19 Cost Tracker Update, Twelfth Report of Session 2021–22, HC173, 19 July 2021 7 HM Treasury, Government response to the Committee of Public Accounts on the Twelfth and Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Reports from Session 2021–22, CP 583, 9 December 2021 8 Letter from Tom Scholar, Permanent Secretary, HM Treasury, to Dame Meg Hillier MP, Monitoring the cost of cross-government programmes, 23 December 2021 9 Q 13 10 Qq 1, 56–58 COVID-19 cost tracker update 9 use a model similar to the cost tracker to monitor other areas of thematic spend, such as the transition towards a net zero economy. HM Treasury said that the nature of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the economy and public finances, meant that it was easier to identify the public spending implications of it than would be the case in other situations. For example, it told us that the banking crisis some 12 years ago was “also an enormous shock” and that it was difficult to attribute particular fiscal pressures to the banking crisis because it required disentangling lost tax revenue and additional public spending. It told us that most net zero related spending will also be designed to achieve other objectives, so it would be difficult to determine what is being spent on one objective or another. HM Treasury recognised, however, that it needed to work out the best way to ens
Government Response
Not Addressed
HM Government
Not Addressed
1.1 The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Target implementation date: Spring 2023 1.2 The government publishes a wide range of expenditure data: • Public Expenditure Statistical Analysis (PESA), showing spend by economic and functional category; • spending figures in the Budget and Spending Review documents, including expenditure limits and thematic ringfenced spend, for example COVID-19 funding; • Main and Supplementary Estimates, detailing all spending for which the government is seeking parliamentary authority; • the Infrastructure & Projects Authority’s (IPA’s) Annual Report on major projects. This includes all projects in the Government Major Projects Portfolio (GMPP); • standalone reports on areas of significant spend, like the government’s Net Zero Strategy; • departmental reports and accounts, detailing departmental spend, for example 2019-20 thematic expenditure data on preparations for EU Exit; and • the Whole of Government Accounts, reporting on all areas of spend across the public sector. 1.3 HM Treasury recognises that in some instances, like the COVID-19 pandemic, additional publications may be required. The COVID-19 tracker demonstrated the value of additional public information in cases where: spend can be clearly attributed to a distinct cause, values for that subset of expenditure can be reliably tracked at a proportionate cost, expenditure is rapidly evolving in quantum and scope, and where there is a clear public interest. In these cases, there could be good cause to re-deploy the benefits of the COVID-19 tracker, providing timely and bespoke updates to supplement existing publications. 1.4 HM Treasury plans to apply the benefits of the COVID-19 cost tracker, in due course, to the public spending implications of the UK’s response to the invasion of Ukraine.