General Reports and Other Publications

NAO: Plans to reorganize central government will bring a range of functions currently at arm’s length closer to ministers, according to the National Audit Office.  Moreover, the Cabinet Office and departments are on course to deliver cost reductions extending beyond the Spending Review period.  
 
However, a recent report raises concerns that government departments do not have a good enough grasp of the ongoing costs of functions being transferred to other parts of government or of the one-off transitional costs of the changes.
Press release & links
 
NAO: The Department for Work and Pensions has introduced the Work Programme quickly, in just over a year, and this has had benefits, but the speed with which it was launched has also increased risks, according to the National Audit Office.  

The Department & providers have made assumptions about how many people the Programme will get back into work but there is a significant risk that they are over-optimistic.
 
The report also points out that no alternatives to the Programme were considered as part of the business case, nor was it piloted to test assumptions.
Press release & links ~ DWP response
 
PC&PE: The Treasury Committee has published a report on the Court of the Bank of England's memorandum, published earlier this week, which responded to the Committee’s ‘Accountability of the Bank of England’ report of November 2011.
Press release & links
 
LGA: The challenging housing situation in the country will be improved if councils have greater involvement, according to a new report from the Local Government Association (LGA) and the Homes & Communities Agency (HCA).
 
The report, entitled ‘Meeting local housing demand', lays out many of the options available to councils.  It makes some suggestions as to how they could go about delivering new homes, improving existing ones and making housing central to local areas.
Press release & links
 
ESRC: New software has significant benefits for primary school children & their understanding of elementary physics, research shows.  Studies funded by the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) focused on what primary school children know when they begin studying physics, and how much they still have to learn.  The studies looked at how much children understand about the movement of objects such as direction & speed.
Press release & links
 
HMRC: HMRC’s renewed strategy for dealing with alcohol duty fraud, now covering wine & beer as well as spirits, is a significant improvement on the previous strategy and the Department has achieved some of its early objectives.
 
However, a report released by the National Audit Office has found that there has been no tangible success achieved in working with industry to disrupt the illegal diversion of duty-unpaid alcohol back into the UK market.  There has also been a low level of criminal sanctions against fraudsters.
Press release ~ HMRC Renewed Alcohol Strategy: A progress report
 
PC&PE: The Defence Committee have described as ‘grotesque’ that 40% of planned military redundancies are to be compulsory while the MoD's current civilian redundancies will be entirely voluntary. The Committee published its report, last week, into the MoD's Annual Report and Accounts 2010–11.
 
For the fifth successive year, the MoD's Annual Accounts have been qualified.  In 2010–11, the MoD did not comply with international financial reporting as laid down by the Treasury and has no plans to do so for the foreseeable future.  The Committee is concerned that the level of theft & fraud in the MoD appear generally to be increasing year on year, and that the level of value recovered from theft & fraud is low.
Press release & links
 
CHNon-communicable diseases (NCDs) are the greatest cause of deaths & disability for humans and have a serious economic impact, says a new Chatham House paper, Silent Killer, Economic Opportunity: Rethinking Non-Communicable Disease.
 
The cumulative losses in global economic output due to NCDs will total $47 trillion, or 5% of GDP, by 2030.  The author, Sudeep Chand, says modest investments to prevent & treat NCDs could bring major economic returns & save tens of millions of lives
Press release & links
 
NIESR: The Government has stated that its primary social policy objective is to increase social mobility.  At a recent research seminar Jonathan Portes, Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), discussed the current state of research on education, inequality & social mobility, and the implications for policy.
Press release & links
 
HMIC: A review by HMIC into the systems & processes of recording crime ‘(The crime scene: A review of police crime and incident reports’) has found that although the majority of forces do well, and improvements have been made, there remains wide variation on accuracy. HMIC looked in depth at two issues:
* incidents reported by the public converted into crimes
* the use of the ‘no crime’ category by the police
Press release & links
 
DCMS: Recommendations from independent panel for widespread deregulation of the tourism & hospitality industries have been published. The proposals, which cover areas such as planning & use classes regulations, travel insurance, food labelling, health & safety rules, employment restrictions in the tourism sector, licensing and many other areas of concern to the industry, will now be considered across Government.
Press release & links
 
JRF: The first systematic review of the real impact of public spending cuts on local authorities has been published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation recently.  It finds that the most deprived local authorities have been hardest hit by the cuts.  It also finds conflict within local authorities over whether the needs of vulnerable people should be prioritised.
Press release
 
IPPR: Reacting to the growth figures for quarter four of 2011, IPPR’s Chief Economist says “the short term outlook suggests the UK economy has slipped back into recession and the feared ‘double-dip’ began in the final quarter of 2011”.
Press release & links
 
CIPD: UK middle managers are feeling the squeeze as a result of the economic downturn, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s (CIPD) quarterly Employee Outlook survey of 2,000 employees.
Press release & links
 
PC&PE: The Commons Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) has published report on Government & IT that insists Government has still to address challenges of ‘intelligent’ procurement.
Press release & links
 
PC&PE: In a report published recently, the Home Affairs Committee criticises the UK Border Agency's management of the processes for the enforced removal of those who are being deported from the UK.
Press release & links
 
TKF: If the benefits of service-line management (SLM) are to be realised then hospital boards must be prepared to cede power and control to clinical teams, despite the difficult financial climate, says a report published recently by The King’s Fund.
Press release & links
 
PC&PE: MPs have called on the Government to reform regulation of the scrap metal industry as part of wider measures to tackle the increase in metal theft.
Press release & links
 
WWF: New rules are urgently needed to ensure all UK and other EU-flagged fishing boats operating in waters outside of Europe, are operating in a sustainable way and to the same standards as they would back home, said WWF-UK last week.

The conservation group made the call as it published a new study revealing in greater detail how commercial fishing globally has dramatically expanded its areas of operation – to now cover over one-third of the world’s ocean surface - and seriously questioning the sustainablity of this level of exploitation of marine resources. 

The study for WWF has for the first time transposed data about the global expansion of fishing activity, from 1950 to the present, to an animated map.
Press release & links
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