27 January 2006
Whitehall departments should do more to identify assets that can be successfully turned into money-making opportunities, government auditors said this week.
The Wider Markets scheme, launched by the Treasury in 1998, encourages departments to identify any buildings, land or intellectual property that can be sold on a commercial basis. The armed forces, for example, are generating £72,000 a year by letting out redundant Boxer communication towers for use as mobile phone masts.
But a National Audit Office report published on January 27 said that, while there were pockets of good practice, three out of four departments had done little to explore commercial opportunities. Auditors found that 77% of wider markets officers spent no more than 5% of their time on the initiative and were therefore unlikely to be fulfilling their primary responsibilities.
Commenting on the report, Public Accounts Committee chair Edward Leigh said that most departments had been 'disappointingly unenthusiastic'.
'To be good stewards of public assets, departments should be seeking additional uses for their talents and should not imagine that the safest course is to bury them,' he said. 'They need to ditch their diffident approach to getting better value from public assets.'
The NAO said a thorough assessment of wider markets was needed and should include the potential to market intellectual property, data-sets and know-how.
The report acknowledged that the success of commercialisation projects could not be guaranteed but suggested a thorough approach to risk management would minimise the impact of failure.
PFjan2006
