Amyas Morse, the Comptroller and Auditor General, has qualified his opinion on the accounts of the Department for Education and the Education Funding Agency (EFA) on a number of grounds.
G4S and Serco, two of the new providers awarded Home Office contracts to provide accommodation for asylum seekers in the UK, struggled to get the contracts up and running.
The NAO welcomes the progress being made by the Northern Ireland Social Security Agency in reducing levels of fraud and error in benefit payments.
The Government’s first sale of shares in Lloyds Banking Group was managed very effectively by United Kingdom Financial Investments Limited.
The use of confiscation orders to deny criminals the proceeds of their crimes is not proving to be value for money.
Not all local authorities’ Council Tax support scheme will achieve the objectives outlined by the Department of Communities and Local Government.
The pension payments and Scheme liability are materially supported by employee records for the first time in two years, but underlying issues remain to resolve.
The current strategy for the prison estate has provided good quality accommodation, but has resulted in the closure of several prisons that were performing well.
Many new Free Schools have been established quickly and at relatively low cost but the DfE will need to tackle a rising cost trend and systematically learn lessons from problems in a few early wave schools.
The DWP has not to date achieved value for money in the development of Universal Credit and to do so in future it will need to learn the lessons of past failures.
It has not yet been demonstrated that funding mechanisms for supporting local economic growth are capable of delivering value for money.
The Service has achieved value for money for debt advice but has not yet shown that its money advice is achieving value for money.
The Charity Commission is not regulating charities effectively. It fails to take tough action in some serious cases and makes poor use of its powers.
The NAO found that the Charity Commission did not properly consider whether The Cup Trust met the key legal requirement of being within the jurisdiction of the High Court of England and Wales before registering it as a charity in 2009, and was slow in handling the case.
Two government programmes aiming to help families with multiple challenges, such as unemployment and anti-social behaviour, are starting to provide benefits but considerable challenges remain.
Progress on the Government’s initiative to achieve £1.5 billion worth of savings from operational PFI contracts.
BIS will not be well-placed to secure value for money on student loan repayments until it has a more robust strategy to improve collection performance.
The Levy Control Framework is a valuable tool for supporting control of costs to consumers arising from government energy policies, but it has not been fully effective in key areas.
HMRC and the Treasury do not know if incentives designed to increase charitable giving, at a cost to the taxpayer of £940 million in 2012-13, have resulted in more income for charities.
This memorandum sets out the events surrounding the Ministry of Justice’s process to re-compete its electronic monitoring contracts and its subsequent decision to commission a forensic audit of these contracts