Government investment in science requires strategic vision and clear information so that it can ensure the UK is investing in the right areas. Our report is accompanied by an Evaluative Framework to guide effective cross-government coordination.
This paper sets out how we used NHS administrative data to compare the characteristics of A&E attendances by mental health service users to those of the rest of the population.
The NAO is publishing a suite of short guides for the new Parliament, one for each government department and a selection of cross-government issues, to assist House of Commons select committees and members of Parliament.
The Audit Committee checklist is based on the Treasury’s Audit Committee Handbook and on feedback from staff and Audit Committees. Audit Committees can assess their performance against best practice using the checklist.
High profile incidents remind individuals and organisations just how important it is to manage potential conflicts of interest. In March 2017, the Court of the Bank of England commissioned a review of the institution’s approach to managing conflicts of interest. The review was prompted by the resignation of Charlotte Hogg who had been Deputy Governor […]
With charities such as museums and galleries relying increasingly on donations to supplement public grant funding, this report summarises the issues faced and best-practice management of the risks associated with donations as a source of income.
The Building Public Trust Awards recognise outstanding corporate reporting that builds trust and transparency. This interactive document illustrates a range of good practice examples in public sector reports.
This paper sets out how we used a technique called “webscraping” to harvest and analyse textual content from the government’s GOV.UK website.
This paper sets out how we used existing data to estimate the impact of our value for money work on stroke care.
This paper sets out how we used instrumental variables to estimate the impact of benefit sanctions on the employment outcomes of sanctioned individuals in the Work Programme – a large welfare-to-work programme for the long-term unemployed.
The Department for Work & Pensions is not doing enough to find out how sanctions affect people on benefits.
This toolkit is designed to guide those overseeing public service markets or assessing the effectiveness of these markets in terms of value for money and user outcomes. It helps government address a set of new challenges around its use of markets to deliver public services, including oversight, consumer protection, regulation and helping to achieve effective competition and innovative delivery.
This interactive publication draws on our audits of government contracts and engagement with government to provide practitioners with insights on the new, emerging higher standard for government contracting.
This good practice guide aids improvement in performance measurement and reporting by regulators and other organisations seeking to deliver outcomes through third parties. It has been developed in collaboration with regulators and includes the NAO’s experience from working with them and examples of regulators’ good practice. It’s complemented by ‘Performance measurement: Good practice criteria and maturity model’.
The incentives on government Accounting Officers to prioritise value for money are weak compared to those associated with the day-to-day job of satisfying Ministers.
This paper sets out how we constructed a counterfactual to establish how much water customers in England and Wales could have benefited from an alternative charging system between 2010/11 and 2014/15.
The Cabinet Office estimates that government commits around £130 billion to grants each year – nearly 20% of all government spend. Grants are an important delivery mechanism for policy across government, not just centrally but also in agencies, local authorities and other bodies across the public sector.
This briefing gives a high-level overview of the range of metrics that government uses to assess and report on sustainable development and environmental protection, and how these compare with good practice principles for a performance management framework.
We present here what we’ve been learning about the problems government faces in managing its business operations, the actions taken to address them, and our analysis of what government needs to focus on to get this right.
This series of papers summarises the methodological approaches we have taken in carrying out innovative or novel analysis. Such analysis is conducted under our statutory authority to examine and report to Parliament on the economy, efficiency and effectiveness with which government departments and other bodies have used their resources.
The Audit insights papers are methodological summaries and do not make new observations about value for money.