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Author: Great Britain: National Audit Office Publisher: The Stationery Office ISBN: 9780102987027 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 70
Book Description
In the memorandum 'The role of major contractors in the delivery of public services' the NAO sets out some of the benefits that can be achieved through contracting but highlights three issues that deserve greater public scrutiny. First, it raises questions about the way public service markets operate. This includes the need for scrutiny over whether public service contracts are sufficiently competitive and whether the rise of a few major contractors is in the public interest. Secondly, it highlights the issue of whether contractors' profits reflect a fair return. Understanding contractors' profits is important to ensure that their interests are aligned properly with that of the taxpayer. But transparency over rewards that contractors make is at present limited. Thirdly, the report asks how we know that contractors are delivering services to the high standards expected. In particular, government needs to ensure that large companies with sprawling structures are not paying 'lip-service' to control and that they have the right culture and control environment across their group. This requires transparency over contractors' performance and the use of contractual entitlement to information, audit and inspection. This should be backed up by the threat of financial penalties and being barred from future competitions if things are found to be wrong. A related report 'Managing government suppliers' (HC 811, session 2013-14, ISBN 9780102987034) examines the way the Cabinet Office is working to improve government's management of strategic suppliers.
Author: Great Britain: National Audit Office Publisher: The Stationery Office ISBN: 9780102987027 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 70
Book Description
In the memorandum 'The role of major contractors in the delivery of public services' the NAO sets out some of the benefits that can be achieved through contracting but highlights three issues that deserve greater public scrutiny. First, it raises questions about the way public service markets operate. This includes the need for scrutiny over whether public service contracts are sufficiently competitive and whether the rise of a few major contractors is in the public interest. Secondly, it highlights the issue of whether contractors' profits reflect a fair return. Understanding contractors' profits is important to ensure that their interests are aligned properly with that of the taxpayer. But transparency over rewards that contractors make is at present limited. Thirdly, the report asks how we know that contractors are delivering services to the high standards expected. In particular, government needs to ensure that large companies with sprawling structures are not paying 'lip-service' to control and that they have the right culture and control environment across their group. This requires transparency over contractors' performance and the use of contractual entitlement to information, audit and inspection. This should be backed up by the threat of financial penalties and being barred from future competitions if things are found to be wrong. A related report 'Managing government suppliers' (HC 811, session 2013-14, ISBN 9780102987034) examines the way the Cabinet Office is working to improve government's management of strategic suppliers.
Author: Barry Pemberton Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317398076 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 347
Book Description
Corporate Governance and the Nuclear Industry explores the UK nuclear Legacy - governance issues associated with the decommissioning of a range of early-generation civil nuclear facilities. This book traces how we got here and the risks that have been taken, whilst presenting new research and thinking that is required to manage our nuclear Legacy. The book addresses a new analytical approach using notions of governance to review key historic events. This approach analyses these events using concepts of stakeholder control, accountability and regulation. Using these concepts and undertaking a more detailed analysis of the Legacy’s current governance arrangements; the conventional public sector-based solutions that attempt to harness private sector expertise, this book will contrast these with government responses to determine the degree of control over the Legacy and any possible control issues. Corporate Governance and the Nuclear Industry concludes that we need to recognise the legacy’s problems as exceptional rather than prosaic, and suggests that this requires exceptional governance solutions rather than the current form that is clearly failing.
Author: Jason NE Varuhas Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1782252800 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 552
Book Description
Winner of the 2018 Inner Temple New Authors Book Prize and the 2016 SLS Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship. Damages and Human Rights is a major work on awards of damages for violations of human rights that will be of compelling interest to practitioners, judges and academics alike. Damages for breaches of human rights is emerging as an important and practically significant field of law, yet the rules and principles governing such awards and their theoretical foundations remain underexplored, while courts continue to struggle to articulate a coherent law of human rights damages. The book's focus is English law, but it draws heavily on comparative material from a range of common law jurisdictions, as well as the jurisprudence of international courts. The current law on when damages can be obtained and how they are assessed is set out in detail and analysed comprehensively. The theoretical foundations of human rights damages are examined with a view to enhancing our understanding of the remedy and resolving the currently troubled state of human rights damages jurisprudence. The book argues that in awarding damages in human rights cases the courts should adopt a vindicatory approach, modelled on those rules and principles applied in tort cases when basic rights are violated. Other approaches are considered in detail, including the current 'mirror' approach which ties the domestic approach to damages to the European Court of Human Rights' approach to monetary compensation; an interest-balancing approach where the damages are dependent on a judicial balancing of individual and public interests; and approaches drawn from the law of state liability in EU law and United States constitutional law. The analysis has important implications for our understanding of fundamental issues including the interrelationship between public law and private law, the theoretical and conceptual foundations of human rights law and the law of torts, the nature and functions of the damages remedy, the connection between rights and remedies, the intersection of domestic and international law, and the impact of damages liability on public funds and public administration. The book was the winner of the 2016 SLS Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship and the 2018 Inner Temple New Authors Book Prize.
Author: Brett Christophers Publisher: Verso Books ISBN: 1788739744 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 513
Book Description
How did Britain’s economy become a bastion of inequality? In this landmark book, the author of The New Enclosure provides a forensic examination and sweeping critique of early-twenty-first-century capitalism. Brett Christophers styles this as ‘rentier capitalism’, in which ownership of key types of scarce assets—such as land, intellectual property, natural resources, or digital platforms—is all-important and dominated by a few unfathomably wealthy companies and individuals: rentiers. If a small elite owns today’s economy, everybody else foots the bill. Nowhere is this divergence starker, Christophers shows, than in the United Kingdom, where the prototypical ills of rentier capitalism—vast inequalities combined with entrenched economic stagnation—are on full display and have led the country inexorably to the precipice of Brexit. With profound lessons for other countries subject to rentier dominance, Christophers’ examination of the UK case is indispensable to those wanting not just to understand this insidious economic phenomenon but to overcome it. Frequently invoked but never previously analysed and illuminated in all its depth and variety, rentier capitalism is here laid bare for the first time.
Author: E. Bell Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1137505788 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 142
Book Description
This study of five key policy areas, from welfare reform to foreign policy, demonstrates that the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition failed to fulfil its promise to reverse the rising power of the State. It exercised more subtle forms of 'soft power', often in partnership with the private sector, and to the detriment of ordinary citizens.
Author: Great Britain: National Audit Office Publisher: The Stationery Office ISBN: 9780102987034 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 58
Book Description
In this memorandum 'Managing government suppliers', the NAO welcomes the fact that the Cabinet Office is now asserting government's position with contractors in way that its scale as a customer merits. Specifically, this has enabled government to get greater value from contracting and has sent signals that government is willing to be tough on underperformance. However, the Cabinet Office still faces a number of challenges in developing a more mature approach. It is currently focused on short-term savings and has adopted a robust approach with departments and suppliers, which has enabled it to report significant savings from contract renegotiations. However, this approach will become harder over time, and risks missing out on achieving longer-term value for money through innovation and investment. There is a balance to be struck between tough negotiations and maintaining relationship with suppliers in the long term, if government is to maintain competition in public sector markets. The Cabinet Office is seeking to reform commercial practice across Government with the development of the Crown Commercial Service. There is a risk that the ambitions are not matched by the right resources, capability and information. It has gaps in commercial experience and expertise below senior levels, while its information on its 40 strategic suppliers is inconsistent and incomplete. A related report 'The role of major contractors in the delivery of public services' (HC 810, session 2013-14, ISBN 9780102987027) sets out some of the benefits that can be achieved through contracting but highlights issues that deserve greater public scrutiny.
Author: Great Britain. National Audit Office Publisher: The Stationery Office ISBN: 9780102954487 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 44
Book Description
This NAO report (HCP 65, session 2008-09, ISBN 9780102954487), examines how well central government organisations are managing their service contracts, assessed against the good practice framework for contract management. A further examination was done into the effectiveness of the Office of Government Commerce in supporting central government to improve contract management. The NAO has focused on contracts for information and communication technology, facilities management and business process outsourcing, where the contract had been signed and the service was up and running. In the 2007-08 period, central government spent over £12 billion on service contracts primarily in the areas of information and communications technology, facilities management and business process outsourcing. In total the NAO estimates that £240 million was spent on managing service contracts in the period 2007-08. Delivery of public services, protection against service failure and achievement of value for money are all dependent on effective contract management. The NAO has set out a number of findings and recommendations, including: that contract management is not always accorded the priority it deserves; that less than half the organisations surveyed had an individual with overall responsibility for contract management; that some contracts had taken several years before a proper system of management was actually in place, including resources and performance measures; that one-quarter of comercial directors/heads of procurement rated the level of resources allocated to contract management as poor; that central government do not routinely test their service contracts and good practice risk management practices are not being consistently applied. For the Office of Government Commerce the NAO found that: limited guidance is available on contract management; that central government organisations identified a need for better training for their contract managers; that no cross-government contract management community exists and that monitoring and managing major suppliers had focused mainly on the IT sector.
Author: House of Commons Public Accounts Committ Publisher: The Stationery Office ISBN: 9780215529763 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 40
Book Description
In 2007-08, central government spent over £12 billion on service contracts, primarily in the areas of information and communication technology, facilities management and business process outsourcing, and an estimated £240 million on managing these contracts. In most cases central government monitors the performance of its suppliers, but it makes limited use of financial incentives to encourage suppliers to improve performance and does not always apply financial penalties where suppliers under-performed. Testing of value for money of ongoing services and contract changes is variable. Planning and governance is one of the weaker areas of contract management. Less than half the organisations surveyed had an individual with overall responsibility for contract management, and there was no documented plan for managing 28 per cent of contracts. In addition, many contracts do not have in place some or all of the elements of good practice risk management. No commercial director/head of procurement rated the level of resources allocated to the management of their major contracts as 'good', and 22 per cent of contract managers considered they did not have time to perform their responsibilities well. Most contract managers had undertaken relevant training, although 60 per cent of organisations did not provide a structured training programme for their staff. The Office of Government Commerce is to issue further guidance on contract management in April 2009, building on the good practice framework it published jointly with the National Audit Office, and it is working to improve the provision of training on contract management. It is also extending its monitoring of major suppliers to government, and is reviewing recent examples of service failure where contractors failed to perform to identify lessons for the future.
Author: Great Britain: National Audit Office Publisher: The Stationery Office ISBN: 9780102965490 Category : Languages : en Pages : 34
Book Description
This report, which focuses on 17 central government departments, finds that in 2009-10, these departments spent over £1 billion on consultants and interim managers (temporary replacements for permanent staff). The departments spent approximately £904 million on consultants in 2006-07. Spending on consultants fell by £126 million in 2007-08, but since then has remained broadly constant, totaling £789 million in 2009-10. Some of the fall in spending up to 2009-10 is likely to be due to increased accuracy in the recording of costs rather than improved control by management, suggesting that some of that reduction in spending is not sustainable. Limited and inconsistent progress has been made against recommendations made in previous NAO and Public Accounts Committee reports. The quality of departments' management information on consultants and interims is poor. Few departments can provide information on their spending by type of consultancy, the number of interims employed, or interims' roles and length of contracts. Departments do not always follow best practice when buying and managing consultancy and interims and most do not assess the performance of consultants or whether the work done was of benefit. In May 2010, the government introduced changes to the approval process for consultants and restrictions on recruitment, including interims, and this has helped to challenge their use. However, this is a short term impact and as a longer term strategy it could lead to the displacement of costs elsewhere. It needs to be built upon to deliver a sustainable approach to structured cost reduction
Author: Great Britain: National Audit Office
Author: Great Britain: National Audit Office
Author: Barry Pemberton
Author: Jason NE Varuhas
Author: Brett Christophers
Author: E. Bell
Author: Great Britain: National Audit Office
Author: Great Britain. National Audit Office
Author: Stationery Office (Great Britain)
Author: House of Commons Public Accounts Committ
Author: Great Britain: National Audit Office