Recommendation 7

It is not acceptable that the Department has spent £168 million on the Programme, and is about to commit to a further £2 billion for the Functional Assessment Service, without being transparent to Parliament about whether it is meeting Accounting Officer standards. All programmes in the Government Major Projects Portfolio (GMPP) should have an Accounting Officer (AO) assessment conducted and summary published at the earliest possible opportunity. Despite having spent £168 million on the Programme since 2018, the Department has not published an AO assessment. We have reported previously that HM Treasury has not done enough to support Accounting Officers to comply with its requirement to complete and publish AO assessments. The updated HM Treasury guidance published May 2023 states that, AO assessments should be published at the earliest decision-making point. The Department asserts that, until the new guidance was published, the Accounting Officer assessment was required to be published at the time of the outline business case and the Programme had not reached that stage. The Department claims that it sought to be transparent about the Programme through other means, but these do not provide sufficient assurance about stewardship of resources which is specific to the Programme. The Department has committed to publish an Accounting Officer assessment alongside its outline business case in Spring 2024. Recommendation 6: HM Treasury should write to the committee within three months, listing any other GMPP programmes that have not published their Accounting Officer assessments, that would be expected to have been already published under its latest guidance. It should also include a rapid timetable for the relevant Departments to publish summary AO assessments now. Revising health assessments for disability benefits 9 1 Achieving transformation of disability benefits for the benefit of claimants and the taxpayer