21 March 2011
Central government needs more finance professionals in top posts, a Treasury minister told the CIPFA international conference last week.
Justine Greening, economic secretary to the Treasury, said the government was faced with reducing the deficit while providing effective public services, and so ‘a cultural change is needed, with more financial professionals in more senior positions across government, and a more cost-conscious culture than we have perhaps seen in the past’.
This objective enjoyed support from Prime Minister David Cameron, the minister told delegates.
In her address on March 17, Greening said senior civil servants and local authority officers should be more financially aware and willing to work with finance professionals.
‘I used to work in industry and I know you can find incredibly intelligent people who go blank about anything to do with money,’ she said. ‘It is a similar process with people across government.’
Reforms being driven by the Treasury would, she said, make this easier by delivering a single dataset ‘so that there is some consistency across government’.
She said the present degree of complexity in government financial reporting ‘stops data from becoming information’.
She gave the example of the three different sets of figures documented in parliamentary votes on spending estimates, the Treasury’s Spending Review and the National Audit Office’s reports on national accounts.
‘None of those three things is exactly the same, which makes it very hard to track through what is happening,’ Greening said.
‘One of my projects is the “clear line of sight”, to minimise differences between them so that we can see through.’
