Managing Front Line Delivery Costs: Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

HC 1279, Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, Session 2010-12

Author:

National Audit Office (NAO)

Publisher:

TSO (The Stationery Office)

Price: £16.00

'Managing Front Line Delivery Costs: Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (HC 1279)' reports the National Audit Office's (NAO) belief that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) needs to scrutinise and challenge its arm's length bodies so that it can oversee cost reductions with minimal disruption to frontline services.

These bodies understand their own costs reasonably well, but the Department still has more to do to achieve the full understanding of the relationships between cost, outputs and outcomes needed to be confident that it is securing value for money.

The Department gives the bodies considerable operational autonomy but has begun to develop ways of more systematically collecting high level financial management information from them and has now rolled out a standard template for collecting financial management data.

As the template focuses on the monitoring of expenditure against high level budgets it does not show whether the full costs of frontline activities are accurately measured and well managed.

This study uses four of the Department's larger delivery bodies as case studies and notes that the Department has few indicators to assess whether the costs of activities in these bodies are high or low.

All four of the bodies that the NAO examined have started to assess costs against internal benchmarks. However, Defra has not requested this data.

Arm's length bodies have struggled to identify external cost benchmarks and the Department does not have comparable information about the unit costs of front-line work. Defra has not yet asked arm's length bodies to explain the basis of their cost calculations.

Extent	38 pages	ISBN	9780102969962
Size	A4	Price	£16.00
Format	Paperback	Published	22 Jul 2011
Availability	Colour copy: 3 - 5 days	Delivery	Delivery options and charges