Recommendation 11

The scale of the likely increase in government borrowing to fund government’s response to COVID-19 is a significant new challenge to the Treasury’s objective to place the public finances on a sustainable footing.22 In its report on Evaluating the government balance sheet: borrowing published in November 2017, the NAO noted that the Treasury had begun to strengthen its approach to analysing the government’s balance sheet and evaluating fiscal risk, but the work at that time was at an early stage and not sufficiently embedded to provide the Treasury with a common view of risk to inform its decision- making.23