Watchdog MPs slam Treasury’s failure to enforce value tests on major projects

Government departments must open up to the public about risks to major spending projects like HS2, the public accounts committee has said. 

In a report published today, the committee said departments were failing to produce “crucial” cost and feasibility assessments or share them with parliament, impacting decision-making about whether a project or programme can be delivered at good value for money. 

The committee called on the Treasury and the Infrastructure and Projects Authority to use accounting officer assessments (AOA) to highlight areas where challenges – such as skills shortages and record inflation – are significantly impacting major programmes. 

According to the report, only 52 of 277 major projects have produced AOAs since new assessment requirements were introduced in 2017. 

Committee chair Meg Hillier MP said the squeeze in public spending had make “effective delivery of major projects within tight budgets even more crucial”. 

She said AOAs had a “crucial role in revealing the thinking of the civil service, separate to political decision making” and were “an essential element of ensuring the government’s major, expensive projects measure up on transparency and cost effectiveness, and are on track to deliver what they promise”.  

“If and when major projects fail, at unacceptable costs to the taxpayer and potentially to society, government cannot say it did not have fair warning,” she added. 

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The report said the quality of AOAs that were produced by government varied substantially across departments, with some failing to provide sufficient detail to allow for a good understanding of the programme or the officer’s assessment of risks. 

It also said that the relevance had been undermined by delays to their publication, with some departments taking more than a year to publish after an assessment had been signed.