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The failure to replace outdated IT systems is hindering the government’s ability to reduce the costs of managing its extensive estate, MPs have warned.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.
The government has said it is working to improve its evaluation work to ensure major projects provide value for money after a parliamentary committee warned there was “no evidence [of] what is...
MPs have criticised the government for allowing “billions and billions” of pounds to be lost to fraud and error in Covid-19 support schemes, and particularly for lacking information on loans and...
The government’s apparent lack of long-term plan to recover overdue debt issued via its £47bn Covid-19 business loan scheme means fraudsters could “walk away with billions of taxpayers’ money”,...
The government does not understand why different academy schools perform differently financially and poor access to local information is harming scrutiny of individual trusts, Parliament’s Public...
The Northern Irish budget process needs to become more transparent and government departments need to collaborate more to improve public sector efficiency, according to a report urging significant...
