Recommendation 14

We asked the Treasury about the extent of missing data and the impact of this on the ability of government to make decisions about public spending. HM Treasury recognised that any gap in data meant that there was uncertainty about the completeness of the information that it was using. It also recognised that, combined with the timeliness of the accounts, this made the WGA a “less timely, less complete set of data for us to base decision making on”.21 It told us that it did not think that this fundamentally changed the way that it made decisions, or the quality of those decisions, as it did not make decisions about public spending in isolation. But it accepted that it needed to think carefully about what it should do next year if there was more missing data, which it expected to be the case, in order to allow people to draw trends as reliably as possible from the data in the WGA.22