Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts Publisher: The Stationery Office ISBN: 0215034570 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 52
Book Description
The Countryside Rights of Way Act 2000 introduced a public right to walk across designated mountain, moor, heath, downs and registered common land in England. DEFRA tasked the Countryside Agency with opening-up the new access by the end of 2005, and the target was met with two months to spare. However the implementation of the right to roam cost the Countryside Agency £24.6 million more than anticipated, with knock-on impacts on other programmes. This report looks at the implementation of open access and the effect of the policy under the headings: encouraging the public to use the right to roam across the countryside; protecting the environment of access land and the rights of landowners; improving planning and project management. However the success of legislation is as yet unknown because there is no information on the extent to which the public are making use of their new right. In October 2006 the responsibility for open access passed from the Countryside Agency to Natural England.
Author: Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Public Accounts Committee Publisher: The Stationery Office ISBN: 9780215525468 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 44
Book Description
This report (HC 814, session 2007-08, ISBN 9780215525468) looks at the work of the British Council and what impact the Council has working with whole societies, how it makes best use of resources and their efforts to increase consistency across the British Council network. It follows an NAO report (HCP 625, session 2007-08, ISBN 9780102954173), on the same topic. The British Council is a Registered Charity and an executive Non-Departmental Public Body as well as a Public Corporation. It aims to build relationships between people in the UK and other countries, through teaching English and running cultural projects. It operates in over 110 countries and engages with over 15 million people a year worldwide. The Committee has set out a number of conclusions and recommendations, including: that the British Council should be congratulated for its achievements in promoting the English language and culture overseas; the Committee believes though that the current teaching model, based on premium prices and concentrated mainly in capital cities, severely restricts its reach; that the Council's recent programme of change has had a negative effect on staff and their view of the Council's leadership; the Council is without a single customer relationship management system, which it is now going to address; that sponsorship and partner income has fallen year on year since 2000-01, and the Council should do more to reverse this trend; the Committee has identified a lack of consistency across the network.
Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts Publisher: The Stationery Office ISBN: 9780215561664 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 52
Book Description
The Efficiency and Reform Group (the Group) was established within the Cabinet Office in May 2010 to lead efforts to cut government spending by £6 billion in 2010-11. Its long term aim is to improve value for money across government by strengthening the central coordination of measures to improve efficiency. The imperative to make savings in the short term has involved the Group imposing new controls on departments, such as moratoria on certain expenditure. Sustained efficiency improvements, though, will need a much deeper change to both the culture and institutional structure of government. The Group also needs to clear up confusion over who is accountable for what in terms of improving value for money, especially in defining its responsibilities and those of the Treasury and individual departments. The Group's actions have resulted in efficiency savings of £3.75 billion across departments in 2010-11. It should continue to describe any future spending reductions accurately and explain any impact on services. The scale of the challenge to deliver efficiencies is huge: the Government intends that half of the £81 billion reduction in spending planned over the next three years should come from efficiencies rather than through cuts to services or delays to important projects. Many of the efficiencies must be achieved in areas where the Group currently has a limited influence, or by local bodies, where it has none. The Group should set out how it will operate to ensure that its approach can be replicated across the wider public sector.
Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts Publisher: The Stationery Office ISBN: 9780215041593 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 44
Book Description
In November 2011, HM Treasury published the first audited Whole of Government Accounts (WGA), covering the year 1 April 2009 to 31 March 2010 (HC 1601, ISBN 9780102975192). The Committee welcomes this major step forward in improving transparency and accountability and highlights some of the information it contains: at 31 March 2010 the government's public service pensions liability was around £1,132 billion; the present value of its future commitments under PFI schemes was £131.5 billion; the government wrote off £10.9 billion in unpaid taxes and expected to have to pay £15.7 billion for outstanding clinical negligence claims; cost of future nuclear decommissioning (£56.7 billion); the need for stronger accountability systems to secure effective responsibility for cost and value for money at local levels - academies, Free Schools, Foundation Trusts and GP consortia. But the WGA will only serve its purpose- showing what the government owns, owes, spends and receives - if it is timely and robust. The figures in the first audited WGA are too dated because Treasury took 20 months to prepare and publish the report. Treasury must address the issues that led the Comptroller and Auditor General to qualify his audit opinion on the WGA 2009-10. A key issue is Treasury's decision to deviate from accounting standards, by omitting Network Rail, the publicly owned banks, and various other government-controlled or owned bodies from the WGA. The Committee sets out a set of principles that future accounts should follow.
Author: Great Britain. Treasury
Author: Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons
Author: Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons
Author: Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons
Author: 
Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts
Author: Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Public Accounts Committee
Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts
Author: Australia. Parliament
Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts