Recommendation 20

For the WGA to record the impact of COVID-19, government bodies will need to record costs in a manner that allows the increase in spending due to COVID-19 to be identifiable from any other changes in spending.42 The Treasury outlined that it was asking Departments to track and record how they are using the ring-fenced money for COVID and EU spending, however this involved significant judgement and manual intervention. The Treasury also confirmed that it was in the early stages of considering how to identify and report non ring-fenced spend on COVID-19 and EU Exit , but were not actively looking at introducing time recording processes to enable staff costs to be recorded against COVID-19 or EU exit.43 This would be essential to capture both the true cost to the government of undertaking this work, and whether government has the capacity to deliver.