Recommendation 13

HM Treasury reiterated what the Chief Secretary to the Treasury set out in his letter of 1 April 2021 to the Chair of the Treasury Committee: that the COVID-19 pandemic is a national health emergency that has required a response by government without precedent in terms of speed and scale.16 Consequently, government was prepared to accept a greater level of uncertainty about the efficacy of spending compared with normal times. HM Treasury told us how it became clear very quickly that responding to the crisis would require it to use the spending control framework more flexibly than it otherwise would have done. It increased delegated departmental spending limits, allocated additional funding for departments to use, and delegated greater authority to departments to enable them to make spending decisions.17 HM Treasury confirmed that it was consulted upon major new funding commitments before they were announced.18