Recommendation 7

We asked UKHSA whether it had sufficient organisational understanding and acceptance of the level of cultural change and process improvement required to fix these issues with its accounts. UKHSA responded that it understood and accepted this. It drew a distinction between the issues which had resulted in its 2022–23 accounts being disclaimed, and those which had resulted in its 2021–22 accounts being disclaimed, which it asserted were “quite different”. It stressed that, in 2021–22, it was a new organisation and had “inherited a number of issues on coming into being” and that it had made “very good progress” in trying to address the issues that had led to its 2021–22 accounts being disclaimed. It also told us that one of the issues it had encountered in its 2022–23 accounts was that it had “very little headroom because of the disclaimed accounts last year”, as well as a separate issue with its covid vaccine model. It explained that it had set up a Finance Control and Improvement Board, chaired by the Accounting Officer, and set up required governance arrangements that were not in place in the prior year.9