Recommendation 15

The Department told us that during the early months of the pandemic it developed greater structure and a stronger framework around exceptional financial support for individual authorities. Exceptional financial support is used where the Department accepts authorities face unmanageable financial pressures despite other government support measures.36 The Department asserted that it had been transparent in relation to cases where Ministers had agreed to provide exceptional financial support.37 However, the Department did not and does not share information on the total number of authorities that have approached it in relation to financial pressures, or the number of authorities where the Department has identified financial concerns itself. Similarly, while the NAO calculated the number of authorities at different levels of risk of financial failure using Departmental thresholds for comparing COVID-19 related funding gaps to reserves for individual authorities, the Department did not share with us or the NAO its own assessment of authorities at risk or how this had changed over time.38