Cross Cutter Set - 3pc - Christening & Communion Cake Decoration & Cupcake Topper Cutters

Product Information

Any failure to comply with the letter or spirit of the spend control regime should be treated as a disciplinary issue for the individual official responsible and a serious performance issue for the accounting officer of the entity. Furthermore, finance ministries typically concern themselves primarily with the budget for individual line departments. Thereafter their interest in how the money is actually spent tends to diminish, even when they have the technical capability to assess it. The question they tend to ask on any item of expenditure is whether it is covered by a line in the department’s budget, and make some kind of assessment of the cost/benefit ratio. They are not always well equipped to analyse the cost side of the equation to assess whether it can be reduced to improve the cost-benefit equation and make the available money go further. For all these reasons, value for money in government spending is often poor. It is therefore helpful to have horizontal spend controls operated from the centre of government but outside the finance ministry. To enable this, the centre must have complete visibility over all existing FM contracts to inform the operation of the control, permitting extensions where necessary to create a single end date for contracts in a particular locality and enabling the new approach to be brought into operation. I recommend that: The I-G should have the power to put units of government into special measures if they don’t deal with fraud effectively, including where a

The Government should appoint an Inspector-General (I-G) to oversee counter fraud measures across all central government entities. A new CEO of GDS should urgently be recruited at director general level. If this appointment can be made from within government, it should proceed without delay, and without waiting for the appointment of the GCDO. DIN stands for Deutsches Institut für Normung, which is essentially the standards body for Germany. It sets standards for products that apply across Europe and internationally.Good progress has been made on communications. However some issues still remain. Too often departments operate in silos, don’t share insights or data, and too often say different things to the same people. Government needs a clear and co-ordinated approach to its communications to best serve the public particularly in these times. The aim should be for the Government to speak with one voice with world-class communications across the board, so the public know and understand the message the Government is trying to communicate. More secure are cross-cut models, sometimes known as diamond-cut, as they shred the paper into small pieces a bit like wedding confetti. It would be much harder for someone to reassemble them. It is a welcome development that HM Treasury has become much more alert to these issues, and the establishment of the new Public Value unit should help to make a real difference here, with a focus on outputs and outcomes rather than inputs. Benefits of spend controls It should be made clear that line departments will be held accountable for digital and technology delivery by the GCDO and ministers at the centre. The GCDO’s mandate should include leading the recruitment, appointment, appraisal and remuneration of chief digital officers in the line departments.

Strengthening the capability of some of the central functions should recreate the sense that involving central expertise early will add value to the line entities. Good central functional leaders should be able to engage, persuade and inspire, and create buy-in and goodwill. They and their central teams must have high technical credibility, at least the match of what exists in the line entities, and should ordinarily be the best anywhere in the government.

The central functions should set standards across government, but they must also ensure that they are enforced. This means sanctions for non-compliance, and a power for the central function to require real-time visibility where they have reason to believe that a department may be falling short of full compliance. Providing expert advice Having said that, of course most activities will be delivered by the functions in the line departments. However, it must be clearly understood that there will be oversight and direction from the centre of the function. Funding

The cross-cutting functions considered in my review - principally commercial, IT and digital, property, major projects, finance, HR - have historically received scant attention either from Ministers or the leadership of the Civil Service. Yet it is through these functions that the bulk of taxpayers’ money gets spent and on which citizens depend for the successful implementation of policies, projects and programmes for which they have voted. Even in the otherwise comprehensive Fulton Committee Report of 1968, these functions get only a passing mention. Tony Blair’s government began a programme of reform, but in 2010 there remained much to be done, with the need for radical change lent urgency by the fiscal crisis the country faced. Notwithstanding the existence of a partial digital pipeline, the digital spend control should be operated rigorously real time, with the Minister for Efficiency making decisions with the advice of the GCDO. When it is agreed that services should be delivered in one place for the whole of government, there should be no inhibition about this being done from the centre. There have sometimes been anxieties about whether the Cabinet Office should be a “delivery department”, and attempts have often been made for “whole of government” activities to be delivered from one of the line departments. I am not aware of any cases where this has been a success, and the temptation to move a central function to a line department should be resisted. It is perfectly normal in big complex organisations for some activities to be delivered from headquarters. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.The I-G should set in train an assessment and accreditation programme for individuals involved in counter fraud work to drive up capability in all central government entities. SROs should be appointed for defined terms to ensure clarity on the date at which they will leave the project. The assumption must also be that they are expected to work their full notice period if they depart early. The commercial models control was removed in 2016 on the basis that the potential transactions were already covered by controls operated by HM Treasury. The original control covered the following transactions: Cabinet Office spend controls were introduced by the Coalition Government in June 2010 in response to the urgent need for fiscal consolidation. The controls were widely expected to be temporary but it became clear that they could play a lasting role in driving out wasteful expenditure. They were seen as a feature of the “austerity“ era, but in truth any organisation, whether in financial distress or not, should always be insisting on maximising the efficient spending of money. Government departments, when left to themselves, do not always exhibit a steely determination to ensure that the best possible value is extracted from every pound they spend. The HR function should move to the same kind of single employer model that has been so beneficial in the government commercial organisation.

The head of finance should be mandated to enforce universal accounting and reporting standards across the whole of government. There should be a presumption that there are no exemptions at all unless there are specific and powerful reasons. The bar for exemption should be set very high.One innovation in 2010 was to start to treat the biggest suppliers to government holistically. The strategic supplier initiative, with experienced Crown Representatives man-marking each strategic supplier, has improved the extent to which these suppliers are required to deliver real value for the taxpayer’s money. Central procurement For all the financial years from 2010-2011 through to 2015-2016, a rigorous exercise was conducted to count - and publish - the savings made across the whole of central government through the efficiency programme, of which the Cabinet Office spend controls were a central element. There were great benefits from this: Consideration should be given to revising Civil Service recruitment principles to ensure a sensible and proportionate process similar to those used in the private sector for the appointment of functional leaders. The advertising and marketing spend control should be applied across ALBs as well as to Departments.