Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 6
6
The Department does not have all the necessary arrangements or qualified staff in place to...
Conclusion
The Department does not have all the necessary arrangements or qualified staff in place to provide assurance that its Equipment Plan is reliable and has been subject to rigorous quality assurance. The Department has made some improvements to its production and presentation of the Plan in recent years. But shortcomings remain, particularly around the reliability and consistency of its adjustments to cost forecasts. The Department has also struggled to strengthen its financial capabilities, with no increase in the 41% of finance staff who have a professional finance qualification. The Department acknowledged the shortcomings of its delegated model. Head Office was not able to provide adequate quality assurance on the production of the Plan, with poor visibility of data used by the Top Level Budgets (TLBs), and struggled to challenge the inconsistency in their judgements. There have also been errors in the last three published Equipment Plan reports, raising further concerns over quality assurance. Recommendation: The Department should re-assess the role of its Head Office team in providing assurance on the affordability of the Equipment Plan and strengthen financial capabilities across the Department, ensuring that TLBs have adequate capacity and capability to make reliable and consistent assessments of future costs. 8 Defence Equipment Plan 2020–2030 1 Assessing the affordability of the equipment programme
Government Response
Acknowledged
HM Government
Acknowledged
6. 1 The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Target implementation date: March 2023 6.2 Strengthening the financial capabilities within the department is a key part of the department’s Finance Functional Leadership Programme. The department will be delivering professional training for level 3, 4 and 7 apprenticeships for staff currently within the finance function. In addition, the department has in place a Finance Skills Certificate for finance function staff. For the senior civil service and military equivalents, the Defence Strategic Finance Programme is available, for which prior completion of the Finance Skills Certificate is mandated. The department is also in the process of developing finance training for budget holders. 6.3 As part of the design of the finance service delivery model, professional qualifications are recommended for those roles that require it and this will form part of the recruitment process when posts become vacant. It takes time to both train and recruit professionally qualified staff, but numbers will increase over time. 6.4 As part of the same programme, the department is also looking to increase capacity by introducing a standardised service delivery model; simplifying and standardising processes and exploiting the use of corporate systems. 6.5 The department is developing a centralised pool of guidance and resources to support analysts across defence which will be ready in Summer 2021. The department’s Analysis Function runs a Quality Assurance Working Group to enable best practice to be shared more widely and increase knowledge of the department's business critical models. 6.6 The department’s Cost Assurance and Analysis Service (CAAS) has developed training and advice in modelling and quality assurance which it provides across defence.