Fifty-seventh report of Session 2010-12 : Documents considered by the Committee on 29 February 2012, including the following recommendations for debate, Financial services: market abuse; Procurement by public entities (draft reasoned opinion); Public proc

This report is a follow-up to the Committee's report on Accountability for Public Money (HC 740, session 2010-11 (ISBN 9780215559029)) an issue at the core of the relationship between Parliament and government. Accounting Officers remain accountable to Parliament for funds voted to their departments but the policy intention is that local bodies will have significant discretion over the services they deliver. In the Government's response, 'Accountability: Adapting to Decentralisation', Sir Bob Kerslake drew a distinction between those services that government delivers directly and those that it may fund but are delivered in more decentralised arrangements. He proposed that Accounting Officers set out, in Accountability System Statements, the arrangements they have in place to provide assurance about the probity and value for money of funds spent through devolved systems. All departments are expected to produce Statements by summer 2012. Departments have made a genuine effort to develop arrangements which reconcile accountability and localism but the Statements so far are unwieldy and considerably more needs to be done to improve their clarity, consistency and completeness. There is concern that accountability frameworks must drive value for money and, critically, are sufficiently robust to address the operational or financial failure of service providers. Departments are placing increasing reliance on market mechanisms such as user choice to drive up performance and value for money, but there are limits to what these mechanisms can achieve. The Treasury needs to take ownership of the system and ensure that the Comptroller and Auditor General has the necessary powers and rights of access to examine the value for money of funds spent through devolved systems

Currently, 340,000 people, or 30 % of eligible care users, have a personal budget, which enables the individual to choose their care provider. The Government wants all eligible users to be offered a personal budget by April 2013. Personal budgets currently cost the taxpayer £1.5 billion each year. The total annual expenditure on care is around £23 billion. Effective oversight of the care market is essential to protect the interests of both social care users and of taxpayers. There is growing consolidation in the social care market at a regional level. Yet the Department did not have a view on what level of market share represents a risk of provider dominance, or arrangements to protect users should a large-scale provider fail. This is worrying given the recent experience of Southern Cross and the high levels of debt that some providers are carrying. There are risks to the future functioning of the social care market from local authority budget reductions. The report notes some difficult areas with personal budgets: provision of advice, ease of changing support, redress. The Department has to rely on local authorities to implement its policy of universal provision of personal budgets but it cannot compel local authorities to act. The Department will shortly issue a White Paper on reforming social care delivery. The changes the Department makes must address concerns about giving users a real choice, overseeing the market to ensure competition and stability, and putting in place arrangements and contingencies to deal with major provider failure.

The reports published as HC 1398 (ISBN 9780215561848), HC1469 (ISBN 9780215561862), HC 1468 (ISBN 9780215038548), HC 1502 ((9780215038585), HC 1530 (ISBN 9780215038913, HC 1565 (ISBN 9780215039910), HC 1444 (ISBN 9780215038968), HC 1566 (9780215039941), HC 1531 (9780215040077)

Under the Public Bodies Reform Programme the Government is reducing the number of its arm's length bodies from 904 to between 632 and 642 by the end of the current Spending Review period and will have a substantial and lasting impact. The Programme is intended to improve accountability for functions currently carried out at arm's length from Ministers. The Cabinet Office says it is on track to make £2.6 billion of administrative savings by 2015. However there are substantial reservations about the robustness of this claim. Key concerns are that: there is a risk departments are claiming savings which are actually cuts to services, when they should be including only genuine savings arising from administrative reorganisations; estimates of transition costs such as redundancy and pension costs are incomplete; the savings estimate does not fully take account of the ongoing costs to other parts of government of taking on functions being transferred from abolished bodies and some departments have wrongly included wider savings from bodies being retained, rather than just administrative savings from bodies being abolished or substantially reformed. The Cabinet Office has accepted that its savings estimate needs to be reassessed and has undertaken to 'rebase' it. Focus now needs to be on managing the Programme effectively. Departments have decided on the form of individual reorganisations themselves without clear direction from the centre, leading in some cases to inconsistent treatment of bodies with similar functions. Furthermore, departments may not be getting the best value for money from the sale or transfer of assets of bodies being abolished

HMRC estimates that the tax gap - the difference between taxes due and the amount actually collected - stood at £35 billion (7.9% of tax due) in 2009-10, although other estimates suggest the figure is much greater. The Compliance and Enforcement Programme brought in £4.32 billion of tax revenue over the five years to 2010-11and is expected to generate a further £8.87 billion by 2014-15. However, in shedding more than 3,300 staff, the Department lost £1.1 billion in potential tax revenue: about £10 in tax lost for every £1 in running costs saved. The Committee is also not confident that the Department is sufficiently clear about the marginal rate of return it could achieve from different levels of spending. In order to live within funding limits, the Department had to defer the introduction of new systems or reduce their scope. In particular, by delaying implementation of its new Caseflow and Spectrum systems, the Department reduced the expected additional tax revenue of £743 million by 2010-11 to £547 million by 2014-15. In this Spending Review period £917 million has been allocated to further activities to tackle tax evasion and avoidance, and to collect more debt. This investment is more than double the money spent on the Programme over the last five years, and is expected to generate an additional £7 billion a year by 2014-15. It is therefore essential that the Department learns and applies lessons learnt. There was also alarm at reports that the Department had advised that the use of managed service companies to avoid tax could ever be appropriate for full-time employees of public bodies

In November 2011, HM Treasury published the first audited Whole of Government Accounts (WGA), covering the year 1 April 2009 to 31 March 2010 (HC 1601, ISBN 9780102975192). The Committee welcomes this major step forward in improving transparency and accountability and highlights some of the information it contains: at 31 March 2010 the government's public service pensions liability was around £1,132 billion; the present value of its future commitments under PFI schemes was £131.5 billion; the government wrote off £10.9 billion in unpaid taxes and expected to have to pay £15.7 billion for outstanding clinical negligence claims; cost of future nuclear decommissioning (£56.7 billion); the need for stronger accountability systems to secure effective responsibility for cost and value for money at local levels - academies, Free Schools, Foundation Trusts and GP consortia. But the WGA will only serve its purpose- showing what the government owns, owes, spends and receives - if it is timely and robust. The figures in the first audited WGA are too dated because Treasury took 20 months to prepare and publish the report. Treasury must address the issues that led the Comptroller and Auditor General to qualify his audit opinion on the WGA 2009-10. A key issue is Treasury's decision to deviate from accounting standards, by omitting Network Rail, the publicly owned banks, and various other government-controlled or owned bodies from the WGA. The Committee sets out a set of principles that future accounts should follow.

Honour based violence and abuse manifests itself in different forms, and this book offers a comprehensive understanding of this phenomenon. This book argues that the limits of honour crimes must be defined more widely so that they include conducts and behaviours that originate from the patriarchal notion of honour, such as honour based oppression and breast ironing. The book provides a critical analysis and synthesis of the law in England and Wales and in the international human rights sphere. The relevant domestic legislation and cases are examined to reflect on whether adequate protection is provided for the victims and potential victims of honour based violence and abuse. Since honour based violence is a violation of human rights, the relevant international human rights law is examined to illustrate the perception of such crimes in the international arena. The effectiveness of any remedy for victims of honour based violence and abuse depends on its capability to change deep rooted behaviours in communities with honour based patriarchal values. This book argues that the law does not provide the effective impact required, in part due to patriarchal structures, and that more efforts should be dedicated to changes in education. It is held that there is a need for an educational programme that is especially designed to tackle violence and promote gender equality. The book will be essential reading for academics, researchers and policy-makers working in the areas of Human Rights Law, Criminal Law and Gender Studies.