Insufficient funding for councils and the government’s failure to properly regulate supported housing mean fraud in the sector is going “largely unaddressed”, MPs have warned.
The government will set the “most generous bar” when funding the costs of contingency and reconstruction works for schools affected by RAAC, a senior official has said.
Slow progress in recovering incorrectly paid or fraudulently claimed Covid-19 business grants, could lead to a loss of almost £1bn, parliament’s Public Accounts Committee has warned.
Significant issues in setting up the UK Health Security Agency created a “fundamental absence of governance arrangements and controls”, leaving £3.3bn of medical supplies unaccounted for and drawing...
Long-delayed reforms to modernise courts in England and Wales have placed an “unacceptable” burden on staff and risk making already long case backlogs even longer, MPs have warned.
Any hope of sustainably clearing the huge backlog in local government audit will fail unless the underlying issue of audit resources is fixed, a committee of MPs has said.
Every pound the government spends is worth scrutinising, especially during an emergency such as the pandemic, parliament's Public Accounts Committee chair Meg Hillier writes upon publication of her...
MPs have suggested councils would likely recover more of the business grant funding lost to fraud and error if they were allowed to keep some of the money.
The government has shown “no real signs” of improvements that would prevent it from making the same mistakes that led to £2.2bn of Covid-19 business loans and grants being lost to incorrect or...
Low capacity in council finance teams and the failure to deal with historic accounting issues mean the current September audit deadline is unlikely to be met, local auditors Grant Thornton have...
“Woeful” progress on recovering fraudulent and incorrect claims from Covid-19 job support schemes has left billions of pounds of public money at risk, the Public Accounts Committee has warned.
Government plans to join up healthcare services will fail unless long-term issues over funding disparity between the NHS and social care are fixed, MPs have warned.
The failure to replace outdated IT systems is hindering the government’s ability to reduce the costs of managing its extensive estate, MPs have warned.
Local authorities should have more power to build homes to support people most in need, and ministers must avoid targets that focus purely on the number of properties built, MPs have said.
The failure of energy watchdog Ofgem to effectively regulate suppliers has saddled households with higher costs and the government with the bill for bailouts, the Public Accounts Committee has said.
Poor understanding of fraud risks and the failure to set targets to reduce incorrect payments could see the government saddled with unacceptable levels of fraud in the benefits system, the Public...
Low investor confidence in the UK and the need to direct domestic money to development projects mean the UK Infrastructure Bank wants to work “much harder” to bring sources of public finance together...
Failures in the local audit market are leading to “increasingly incomplete and unreliable” data in central government reporting with councils left in the dark over spending decisions, the Public...
The government is unlikely to hit its target for delivering affordable homes in rural areas, because wider market issues have had “a disproportionate impact” there, a senior civil servant has warned...
Sustained long-term funding and higher local authority retention of right-to-buy sales hold the key to meeting affordable homes targets, experts have said.
A group of MPs has criticised the government’s procurement at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, which they say has left officials needing to burn billions of pounds worth of surplus or faulty...
The lack of clarity over ministerial involvement in approving Levelling Up Fund bids has been branded “unsatisfactory” by parliament’s Public Accounts Committee.
