Recommendation 29

We asked the Treasury how it was reflecting the issue of Net Zero spending in the WGA, given its importance across government and therefore every public body that is included in the WGA. At present, the WGA deals primarily with listing spending commitments relating to Net Zero. HM Treasury committed to making this information more prominent as the money begins to be spent and it has data on what has been spent against those commitments.52 We observed that, as with COVID spending, some of this spending will become business as usual, so it will be important to balance this with the ability to track funding. There is also a risk that both the funding and the activity become so entrenched as business as usual that the impact can no longer reliably be tied to the intervention. HM Treasury maintained that for the moment, it was sufficient to know where spending is planned – in the 2021 Spending Review, and in the performance reports of individual components. The NAO noted that the data that HM Treasury plans to collect now will only be published in two to three years, given the accounts’ productions schedule. The public bodies that are incorporated into the WGA and their auditors will need time to produce audited sustainability data.53 Optimal use of WGA data