The UK Government's Chief Secretary to the Treasury has announced ‘wide ranging reforms' to modernise and reform the architecture of public spending across government.
In a speech at the Institute for Government, Darren Jones laid out his plans to transform and upgrade the government’s central finance system, which he said would improve the timeliness and accuracy of data shared between departments and HM Treasury to boost decision-making at the heart of government.
Currently, departments track their own spending and performance, and share data with the Treasury via manual uploads in online spreadsheets and physical letters. This means the Treasury does not have real time access to departments the finance and performance management data and cannot see in real time departmental spending and its impact.
To address these inefficiencies, the Chief Secretary has formed plans to transform government’s approach to understanding, tracking, and evaluating spending across departments.
Under these new plans, Ministers will have access to live and real-time performance data at both a departmental and programme level.
This means Ministers will be able to see in real time what programmes are over or under spending, which projects are delivering and not, and how departments are performing against their budgets and objectives.
Chief Secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones said:
“The Prime Minister been clear that the government will rewire the state, so that it better delivers on the people’s priorities.
“I am convinced that through investment and reform, we can deliver a more productive and agile state that delivers better outcomes for people and reduces the cost of running public services.
“That’s why as part of my wider reforms to public spending, HM Treasury will be using technology to analyse finance and performance data in real time and free up departments to focus on delivery instead of Treasury compliance reporting.”
