The Chief Commercial Officer should be given a mandate to ensure that all contracts are being managed by properly accredited contract managers. I believe that the time is right for a significant strengthening of the Chief People Officer’s mandate. I recommend: The Head of the Government Finance Function should be given a strong mandate covering the appointment and appraisal of finance directors across government, and to set in train an assessment and accreditation programme for financial management personnel across government, including ALBs. This gave the Cabinet Office visibility over all of the activity that might present an opportunity to innovate. This led to the creation of more than 100 public service mutuals owned and led by the workforce; and mutual joint ventures that delivered services significantly cheaper while giving the government a valuable carried ownership interest in the new entity, such as the Crown Hosting Service. DIN stands for Deutsches Institut für Normung, which is essentially the standards body for Germany. It sets standards for products that apply across Europe and internationally.

Consideration should be given to revising Civil Service recruitment principles to ensure a sensible and proportionate process similar to those used in the private sector for the appointment of functional leaders. Numerous entities within the central government’s ambit have been exempted from spend controls. The Minister for Efficiency and Transformation has already instructed that all of these exemptions must be presented to him so that he can make a decision on whether the exemption should remain. I strongly agree with this approach, and recommend: The purpose of this work is a) to assess the effectiveness of the functions, in particular those that drive efficiency and effectiveness; arrangements in the Cabinet Office to operate effective real-time spend controls; and progress in delivering key parts of the 2012 civil service reform plan; and b) make recommendations. Many of the difficulties and conflicts around the mandate for the central functions have arisen because of the recharging model. At the heart of the recharging model is the mistaken idea that this is a quasi-commercial relationship, where the central function is a supplier and the department a customer. A true functional model cannot work on this basis. As I make clear elsewhere, the centre must in the last resort be able to direct departments. It is a fundamentally different kind of relationship. I recommend:

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Credit card or CD slot: Some shredders can handle CDs and DVDs – either through the main slot or a separate one. If you have sensitive data written to disc, consider a model with this function. Furthermore, finance ministries typically concern themselves primarily with the budget for individual line departments. Thereafter their interest in how the money is actually spent tends to diminish, even when they have the technical capability to assess it. The question they tend to ask on any item of expenditure is whether it is covered by a line in the department’s budget, and make some kind of assessment of the cost/benefit ratio. They are not always well equipped to analyse the cost side of the equation to assess whether it can be reduced to improve the cost-benefit equation and make the available money go further. For all these reasons, value for money in government spending is often poor. It is therefore helpful to have horizontal spend controls operated from the centre of government but outside the finance ministry.

The rule whereby internal audit reports are confidential to the line entity should be discontinued. A sharing protocol should be developed and agreed setting out how and under what circumstances internal audit reports should be shared by the head of GIAA with ministers and senior officials in the Treasury and Cabinet Office, having Departments must keep, and provide to the IPA when requested, data on all their major projects. This data should be kept consistently up to date, and be accurate and complete according to the IPA’s standards.

While any necessary legislation is prepared, this post can be created in shadow form at the head of the FEDG functions, and so far as is possible within existing legislation these powers should be given to the shadow I-G. In any government, there are several cross-cutting or horizontal functions that are recognisably the same wherever they exist, which include financial management, procurement, IT and digital, major projects, property, HR and internal audit. The commercial models control was removed in 2016 on the basis that the potential transactions were already covered by controls operated by HM Treasury. The original control covered the following transactions:

Projects must gain the approval of the IPA to pass through any stage gates. Where this is not followed, the Treasury will withhold funding until there is clear evidence that the department has implemented the IPA’sTo pass through any stage gates, projects should have a competent Senior Responsible Officer (SRO) in place, with a signed appointment letter, a commitment to the required training, and a deliverable span of work agreed with the IPA. The I-G should have the power to create data sharing gateways where needed to facilitate a coordinated approach to fighting fraud.

first discussed the issues of concern with the Permanent Secretary and Minister in charge of the Department. It was a transparent way for the government to hold itself to account for improving efficiency; and A Cabinet sub-committee on efficiency and transformation should be established, co-chaired by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and the Chief Secretary, with the Minister for Efficiency and Transformation as a member, and including ministers from the major spending departments.There are several different types of property. My focus is on office accommodation. The introduction of the National Property Control in 2010 allowed the centre to have holistic oversight of the government’s occupancy office property. The ability to prevent a line entity from taking on a new lease gave the centre levers to drastically improve the government’s office occupancy efficiency. This led to the government’s central Whitehall Estate being better used, with colocation of departments, open plan and hot desking more accepted. Latterly in the Coalition Government, the One Public Estate programme enabled the wider public sector to participate in this holistic approach, with hubs being created in several places where numerous public bodies - central government, local government, NHS, ALBs - could be co-located. The National Statistician should be tasked with undertaking a comprehensive audit of analytical capability in the universe of policy officials, with a rigorous assessment and accreditation programme, and with devising an improvement programme.