Recommendation 6

The programme had suffered several serious setbacks before the Treasury gave it the attention it deserved. While NS&I is responsible for the Programme, the Treasury is NS&I’s sponsor department and, given its wider role in promoting good practice in managing major programmes and the high risk that the Programme delivery carried, we would have expected the Treasury to have been more heavily involved from the start. The Treasury had applied its usual scrutiny to the Programme’s Outline Business Case in 2020 and Full Business Case in 2023, approving each subject to conditions, but there were no consequences for not delivering. The Treasury that has been more interventionist since 2024, and told us it acknowledged that it should have intervened much earlier in the Programme. The Treasury expects NS&I to say whether it can deliver within budget when it has an agreed integrated plan, but was vague on how it would assess requests for more funding. We are concerned if further funding were to be approved without real assurance that NS&I can demonstrate it has a realistic plan. recommendation a. The Treasury should report to the Committee setting out more clearly how it will assess NS&I agreed integrated plan, including the sufficiency of its budget for the Programme. b. The Treasury should set out what it has learned from its oversight of NS&I’s Programme, and examples of what it has changed in how it looks at government activities more generally. 6 1 Causes of failure to deliver the Programme Introduction