Recommendation 5

The Department’s lack of transparency on the service’s performance is hindering the kind of engagement with stakeholders that it claims to want. The Department has committed to learning lessons from the Windrush scandal, including listening to the people most affected by the Department’s policies and operations and consulting with a wide range of people and organisations. Yet stakeholders who represent asylum seekers still need more information on the contracts’ performance to help them better support people. For example, stakeholders need greater transparency over service standards and performance management to give them confidence that the Department has effective mechanisms in place to hold suppliers to account for the services they provide. Cabinet Office guidance on public contracts states that departments should publish data on contract performance. A year into these new contracts, the Department has not yet published any performance data, although it plans to publish some performance information from October 2020.1 Recommendation: The Department should immediately meet its commitment to communicate with stakeholders by publishing data for all key performance indicators, and should also identify what other information, if published, would provide stakeholders with a full picture of the service.