By Richard Johnstone | 28 May 2013
The plan to abolish the Audit Commission is one of 89 major Whitehall projects facing significant obstacles to implementation, according to a Cabinet Office review.
Its examination of the government’s 170 largest projects, which are together worth more than £350bn, also found that ‘urgent action’ was needed to address risks in the Universal Credit 'single-benefit' programme.
The review, carried out by the Major Projects Authority, used a traffic-light warning system to rank the schemes. Fifty-eight were given the ‘amber’ rating, meaning successful delivery is ‘feasible’, but 'significant issues already exist, requiring management attention'. The abolition of the Audit Commission is in this group.
A further 23 projects, including Universal Credit, were rated ‘amber-red’, meaning successful delivery is in doubt, and eight schemes were ‘red’, where successful delivery appears ‘unachievable’.
Commenting on the amber warning, the Department for Communities and Local Government insisted that plans to abolish the Audit Commission were ‘on schedule’. The commission’s in-house audit practice has already been outsourced to the private sector, and the Audit Bill was published earlier this month.
The departmental response, published alongside the rating, added that outsourcing had achieved a 40% saving on audit fees for local public bodies.
Universal Credit's amber-red rating comes after only one of four planned trials of the new system began last month.
But the Department for Work and Pensions said the information behind the rating was more than seven months old. ‘Since then, significant progress has been made in the delivery of Universal Credit,’ the DWP statement said.
‘The pathfinder was successfully launched and we are on course both to expand the pathfinder in July 2013 and start the progressive national roll-out of Universal Credit in October.’
The Department for Transport’s High Speed 2 rail programme to build a new line linking London to Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, was also rated amber-red. The DfT said it welcomed the MPA’s examination, but added that progress had been made to address ‘many of the concerns’ raised, including improving governance arrangements.
Among the projects rated ‘red’ across Whitehall is the rail franchising programme for the West Coast mainline following the botched award of the contract, and a planned upgrade to the online application system for passports.
Publishing the data, Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude said that reviews of major projects had helped save taxpayers more than £1.7bn since the MPA was formed in 2011.
He added: ‘Publishing this report will transform the management of expensive, important projects and will help hold Whitehall to account.
‘I was staggered when I came into government and found a relaxed approach to managing projects worth hundreds of billions of pounds. Problems were swept under the carpet where they festered at the taxpayers’ expense. In many places the civil service lacked project management skills and had a lamentable record of project delivery.’
MPA head David Pitchford added that standards of major projects in the UK ‘were not great’ when he took the job.
‘There have been big changes and Britain is now well on the way to becoming world-class,’ he added. ‘The Major Projects Authority has real power to intervene in failing projects and stop taxpayers’ money being wasted.’
