Thirty-eighth report of Session 2010-12 : Documents considered by the Committee on 19 July 2011, including the following recommendation for debate, EU enlargement: Croatia

In 2007-08, new pension schemes were introduced for civil servants, NHS staff and teachers, designed to make public service pensions affordable. The changes are likely to reduce costs to taxpayers of the pension schemes by £67 billion over 50 years, with costs stabilising at around 1% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or 2% of public expenditure. The Committee is concerned that the Treasury did not test the potential impact of changes in some of the key assumptions underpinning the long-term cost projections. In addition, the Treasury has not tested whether reducing the value of pensions would affect the public sector's ability to recruit and retain high quality staff. Three-fifths of the savings to the taxpayer were expected to come from the cost sharing and capping mechanism - a transfer, from employers to employees, of extra costs that arise if pensioners live longer than previously expected. Employees would potentially pay 70% more for their pensions over the next 50 years if life expectancy continues to increase more than expected. Implementation remains on hold while the Government decides how to respond to the Independent Public Service Pensions Commission (the Hutton Commission). Public service employees do not have a clear understanding of the value of their pensions because they are not provided with clear and intelligible information to enable them to make rational decisions. Further changes to public service pensions are expected as Hutton's recommendations are implemented, but this should bring a period of stability and certainty for long-term public service pensions policy.

The Ministry of Defence announced in the summer of 2010 that it had a funding gap of £38 billion over the next ten years. As part of the Government's efforts to reduce the deficit, the Department also needs to reduce its annual spending by 7.5% in real terms by 2015. It intends to achieve a significant proportion of its required savings by reducing its civilian personnel by 29,000 and its military personnel by 25,000, which it estimates will save £4.1 billion between 2011 and 2015. The Department is currently enacting a transformation programme to change its way of working in order to deliver on the Strategic Defence and Security Review priorities with fewer staff. However, the Department has put plans in place to implement reductions in its workforce before it has finalised its new operating model. The operating model will set out how the Department will meet its objectives in the future, but its reductions in workforce will be well advanced before the model is agreed. There is concern that plans to reduce the workforce have been determined more by the need to cut costs than by considering how to deliver its strategic objectives and that there is a risk of further skills gaps developing. This could make the Department increasingly reliant on external expertise with consultancy expenditure having already grown from £6 million in 2006-07 to £270 million in 2010-11.

HM Revenue & Customs faces a huge challenge to resolve long-standing problems with the administration of PAYE and tax credits while making substantial reductions to its running costs. The Department needs to stabilise its administration of PAYE following the problems encountered after a new processing system was introduced in 2009. It also needs to recover a significant amount of outstanding tax credit debt while minimising the amount of new debt being accumulated. While £900 million extra has been allocated to tackle tax avoidance, at the same time, following the 2010 Spending Review, the Department is required to reduce its running costs by £1.6 billion over the next four years. The Department has made progress in improving PAYE administration since the Committee's last examination of this area in 2010. However, as a consequence of the Department's handling of the 2009 transition to the new PAYE Service, it has had to forgo up to £1.2 billion of income tax underpaid from 2004-05 to 2009-10. Under current plans, it will take until 2013 before all processing backlogs are cleared and the new PAYE Service is operating as intended. The Department needs to focus on improving data quality in particular to sustain progress in PAYE administration. Without a clear plan for reducing tax credit debt, the level of uncollected debt will continue to rise to an estimated £7.4 billion by 2014-15. The Department has been forced to acknowledge that much of this debt will never be recovered from tax credit claimants, and recently wrote off some £1.1 billion of debt dating back to the introduction of the scheme.

The NAO report on this topic published as HC 1665, session 2010-12 (ISBN 9780102977011)

Around half of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's budget is spent in foreign currencies. In 2008, the Treasury removed the protection it had previously provided to the Department against exchange rate fluctuations. The FCO did not have the expertise or experience to effectively manage the risk of a fall in exchange rates, and that the Treasury imposed poor value for money conditions on forward purchasing foreign currency. As a result of a decline in the value of sterling, in September 2009 the FCO faced an overspend of £91 million on its 2009-10 budget (£72 million centrally and £18.8 million overseas), out of its total budget of £1.6 billion. It made drastic cuts to reduce this overspend. The FCO did well to reduce spending so quickly, which enabled it to live within its budget. However, many of the spending cuts made were short term in nature, and involved simply delaying or stopping some activities, rather than making lasting efficiency improvements. Not enough was done to monitor and measure the impact of the cuts and there is a risk that such short term cuts can lead to increased spending in the future. The FCO needs to achieve sustainable reductions in running costs of £100 million over the next four years, and sees the overseas estate as a potential source of these efficiencies and income. But in the past, high charges have had the unintended consequence of discouraging other government departments from sharing premises.

The Committee of Public Accounts scrutinises the reasons behind individual Departments exceeding their allocated resources, and reports to the House of Commons on whether it has any objection to the amounts needed to rectify the reported excesses. The Committee may also make recommendations to Departments concerning the causes of these excesses. In 2010-11, two bodies breached their expenditure limits: The Department for Transport breached its Net Cash Requirement by £335.2 million, primarily because of weaknesses in monitoring its budget for the operation of its rail franchises; The Teachers' Pension Scheme (England & Wales) breached its Net Cash Requirement by £11.9 million because the Department for Education underestimated the number of members that would retire in 2010-11 and overestimated the contributions that would be collected from employers. On the basis of an examination of the reasons why these two bodies exceeded their voted provisions, the Committee has no objection to Parliament providing the necessary amounts by means of an Excess Vote. Nevertheless, it expects both bodies to set out what actions they have taken to improve their financial management and avoid exceeding their allocated resources in the future.

Forty-eighth report of Session 2010-12 : Documents considered by the Committee on 7 December 2011, including the following recommendations for debate, Energy efficiency, Trans-European Networks: integrated EU infrastructures, EU financial instruments for

The Commons Public Accounts Committee publishes its 61st Report of the Session which, on the basis of evidence from the Cabinet Office and HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), examined tax disputes. At 31 March 2011 HM Revenue & Customs was seeking to resolve tax issues valued at over £25 billion with large companies, some of which included disputes over outstanding tax. In this report, the Committee expresses concern about how the Department handled some cases involving large settlements and that there needs to be proper separation between the negotiation of tax settlements and the authorization of such settlements. The Committee also states that HMRC made matters worse by trying to avoid scrutiny of these settlements, keeping confidential the details of specific settlements with large companies. This effects Parliament's ability to establish value for money, compounded further by imprecise, inconsistent and potentially misleading answers given by senior departmental officials, including the Permanent Secretary for Tax in particular over his evidence on his relationship with Goldman Sachs, in facilitating a settlement with the company over their tax dispute. HMRC governance processes in these matters were inconsistent and it has now appointed two new Commissioners with tax expertise, and plans to introduce a new assessor role to permit independent review of large settlements before they are finalised. The Committee further states that it saw little evidence of personal accountability within the Department, and that a perception has developed that large companies are treated more favourably, receiving preferential treatment compared to small businesses and individuals.