This document sets out the respective roles and responsibilities of the Home Secretary and the Director General of the National Crime Agency (NCA) and the principles that will govern the relationship between the Home Office and the NCA. It also sets out the ways in which the NCA will operate under the Crime and Courts Act 2013, covering accountability, management, operational and financial arrangements.
Government has no overall coherent strategy for confiscation orders and this fundamentally undermines the process for confiscating assets. In 2012-13, 673,000 offenders were convicted of a crime, many of which had a financial element, yet only 6,400 confiscation orders were set. The annual amount of fraud perpetrated by criminals in England and Wales has been estimated by the National Fraud Authority as some £52 billion. On this basis, it has been further estimated that, out of every £100 generated by the criminal economy, £99.65 was kept by the perpetrators. Without the government knowing what constitutes the overall success of its policy, the bodies involved have no way of knowing which criminals or court cases should be prioritized for confiscation activity. Action was not taken early enough in many cases and this, together with out-of-date ICT systems, data errors and poor joint working, hampers the efficiency and effectiveness of enforcing confiscation orders. Throughout the criminal justice system, there is insufficient awareness of the proceeds of crime and its potential impact. Confiscation orders have a low profile within law enforcement agencies, with low awareness of financial legislation outside specialist teams. This results in many cases not being considered for confiscation. Owing to a lack of data and agreed success criteria, it is impossible to make meaningful cost-benefit assessments of the enforcement of different orders. Where confiscation orders are made and not paid, the main sanctions do not work. The Courts and Tribunals Service found that in 2012, only two per cent of offenders paid in full once the sentence was imposed.
The National Audit Office was invited by HM Treasury to review the economy, efficiency and effectiveness with which the FSA has used its resources. The main conclusions cover five main areas: 1) performance management, where the FSA is developing useful tools to manage its performance but needs to enhance its grip on cost information and streamline the Outcomes Performance Report; 2) working with other UK regulators - the FSA has good relationships but should focus on working collaboratively with the Office of Fair Trading; 3) international influence and representation, where it is generally effective but should sharpen its communication to stakeholders; 4) financial crime - combating financial crime has received less attention than other areas of FSA's responsibilities but it has recently restructured to enhance its efforts in this area; 5) financial capability of consumers - the FSA is a world leader in this but it should focus on the costs of low financial capability and develop a medium term strategy.
In 2004, the Government announced 110 Public Service Agreement (PSA) targets for 17 Departments covering the period 2005-08. PSA targets express the priority outcomes that Departments are seeking to achieve nationally and internationally, and cover key aspects of the Government's social, economic and environmental policy. Large sums of public money are devoted to the programmes designed to deliver them. This NAO report summarises the results of its examination of the data systems used by twelve government departments to monitor and report progress against their 2005-08 PSA targets, covering a total of 237 data systems. Overall Departments have successfully taken steps to improve the quality of their data systems. There are still improvements that can be made to increase the relevance and reliability of data used in the reporting process. The NAO makes a number of recommendations on specification of data systems, their operation, and the reporting of data. A companion volume (HCP 22-I, ISBN 9780102951615) is available separately which contains the NAO's summarised findings.
The Home Office has been effective at raising the profile of domestic violence and alcohol related crime and encouraging local action to address these issues. Such action is likely to have made some contribution to the overall fall in levels of violent crime. It has not yet managed to address successfully barriers which are reducing the effectiveness of crime prevention activities at a local level and which have been raised in previous reports by the National Audit Office and the Committee of Public Accounts. However, the Home Office has made some progress in addressing these barriers. The persistence of these barriers means that good practice has not been extended from small initiatives, and Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships have not been able to take a long-term, strategic approach to tackling violent crime. There are a number of NAO recommendations.
The Home Office has made good progress in improving its financial management since 2009 when the National Audit Office last evaluated its financial capability. However, while financial control is good, the Home Office could do more to integrate its financial and operational planning and thereby understand better the link between resources and performance. In addition, many of the strengths which the Department demonstrates in its core business are much less apparent in its 'change programmes'. The Department is starting to benefit from its new governance structures but there still challenges. The Department has clear plans to reduce costs in its core activities but business areas have not fully considered efficiency and effectiveness when evaluating where cuts should be made. The Department will need to achieve further savings of £1.1 billion a year by 2014-15 but a third of this sum remains uncertain. Reductions in funding from the Home Office mean that police forces must make savings worth around £1.5 billion by 2014-15 through efficiency improvements; but, in 2011, around two-thirds of forces had shortfalls in their cost reduction plans, amounting to £500 million in total. The Department will shortly be in a position to confirm how far this savings gap has been covered in the plans. There are risks to the successful delivery of the Department's change programmes, specifically in respect of the development of the National Crime Agency (NCA) and Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) and the phasing out of the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA)
Network Rail owns most of Britain's 2507 stations and is responsible for their structural repair and renewal. It also operates and manages 17 large stations, known as managed stations. It leases the remainder, known as franchised stations, to 22 Train Operating Companies (TOCs) responsible for station maintenance, cleaning and operations. The Strategic Rail Authority (SRA) sets minimum standards, including facilities and services required at franchised stations, monitors TOCs' compliance with requirements and helps fund stations' operation and improvement. In this report, NAO examines whether passengers are satisfied with station facilities and services and whether station requirements are being met, the barriers to station improvement and what is being done to overcome them. There has been a little improvement in passengers' satisfaction over recent years. National Passenger Survey data show that satisfaction increased from 59 per cent to 63 per cent between 1999 and 2005, but the greatest levels of dissatisfaction are with the more than 2000 small and medium-sized stations which are unstaffed, or staffed for only part of the day, and which have few facilities. But there is a gap between rising passenger expectations on the one hand, and value for money and what the government and the industry can afford to spend on the other. Funding constraints constitute the biggest barrier to further improvement. Having originally envisaged spending £225 million on new facilities at 980 stations in its Modern Facilities at Stations programme, the SRA shrank the programme to £25 million and 68 stations to match the amount of money the Department for Transport made available.
Between May 2005 and June 2009, there were over 90 reorganisations to central government. This report finds that these cannot demonstrate value for money, given that most had vague objectives and that costs and benefits were not tracked. The average annual cost of reorganisations is almost £200 million, around 85 per cent of which is for the reorganisation of arms length bodies. Since 1980, 25 central government departments have been created, including 13 which no longer exist. By comparison, in the United States only two new departments have been created over the same period. Central government bodies are weak at identifying and securing the benefits they hope to gain from reorganisation. There is no standard approach for preparing and assessing business cases setting out intended benefits against expected costs. More than half of reorganisations do not compare expected costs and benefits of alternative options, so there can be no certainty that the chosen approaches are the most cost effective. Furthermore, no departments set metrics to track the benefits that should justify reorganisation - making it impossible for them to demonstrate that the eventual benefits outweigh costs. There is no requirement for bodies to disclose the costs of reorganisations after they happen - meaning the true cost of reorganisation is often hidden. The decisions to reorganise departments and arms length bodies are often taken at short notice and with inadequate understanding of what could go wrong.
Ministers have challenged all Departments to reduce their 2004 sickness rates by 30% by 2010. This report looks at the sickness levels in the Department of Transport and its seven executive agencies, which average 10.4 days sickness for each full-time employee (compared to a Civil Service average of 9.8 days). However the performance is varied. The central Department and four agencies have sickness levels at or below comparable organisations but three agencies have higher levels and the Driving Standards Agency and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency have absence rates of 13.1 and 14 day respectively. If there is going to be a significant change there needs to be action at the corporate and individual business level. Corporately there needs to be: targets for each part of the Department, tailored to circumstances; quality standards for recording sickness with the provision of management information; a consistent framework for evaluating initiatives and sharing good practice. At a business level more could be done to ensure that line managers were aware of their responsibilities and improve intervention in long-term cases.
This report contains two independent reviews that are part of a series of reports the NAO will be producing into savings reported by departments as part of the targets set by the 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review. The Department for Transport reported savings of £892 million, of which the NAO found that 43 per cent fairly represent realised cash savings, 22 per cent may represent realised cash savings but with some uncertainty, and 35 per cent may be overstated. At the Home Office, the NAO sampled £338 million of £544 million reported savings and found 59 per cent of these fairly represent realised cash savings, 24 per cent may represent realised cash savings but with some uncertainty, and the NAO has significant concerns over 17 per cent. Overall, the Government has set a target to generate annually cash-releasing savings of £35 billion by 2010-11. The savings programme is based on the principle that the planned savings have already been removed from departments' budgets. Departments therefore have to deliver savings to release enough cash to meet their spending plans or reduce activity compared with the planned level. The NAO is satisfied that, in many cases, both departments are achieving long term savings. The main reasons for the NAO's concerns are: Eighty per cent of the Department for Transport's reported savings relate to support for the rail industry. The NAO considers the benchmarks against which these savings were measured should have been revised in the light of the most recent information, which would reduce the savings reported in 2008-09. The main reasons for the NAO's concerns with around 17 per cent of savings reported by the Home Office were that reported gains were one-off cash savings which will not permanently reduce the Department's expenditure, or were not new annual savings as the procurement actions had been taken in prior years.
An academy is a new type of school that is publicly funded, supported by one or more sponsors and operates independently of the local authority. Their aim is to raise achievement standards in deprived areas by replacing poorly performing schools. By 2006 46 were operating and there are plans for 200 academies to be opened by 2010. This report looks at the capital and running costs, new academy buildings, academic performance, their contribution to tackling social depravation, and the management of the programme. The value for money assessment is that academic progress means that the Academy programme is on track to deliver good value for money. However to achieve this goal it needs to pay attention both to managing the capital costs and the sustainability of funding and performance.
The cost of cyber crime to the UK is currently estimated to be between £18 billion and £27 billion. Business, government and the public must therefore be constantly alert to the level of risk if they are to succeed in detecting and resisting the threat of cyber attack. The UK Cyber Security Strategy, published in November 2011, set out how the Government planned to deliver the National Cyber Security Programme through to 2015, committing £650 million of additional funding. Among progress reported so far, the Serious Organised Crime Agency repatriated more than 2.3 million items of compromised card payment details to the financial sector in the UK and internationally since 2011, preventing a potential economic loss of more than £500 million. In the past year, moreover, the public reported to Action Fraud over 46,000 reports of cyber crime, amounting to £292 million worth of attempted fraud. NAO identifies six key challenges faced by the Government in implanting its cyber security strategy in a rapidly changing environment. These are the need to influence industry to protect and promote itself and UK plc; to address the UK's current and future ICT and cyber security skills gap; to increase awareness so that people are not the weakest link; to tackle cyber crime and enforce the law; to get government to be more agile and joined-up; and to demonstrate value for money. The NAO recognizes, however, that there are some particular challenges in establishing the value for money
The Security Industry Authority, the body which licences security guards, door supervisors and vehicle immobilisers, has secured a high level of compliance by people working in the industry with the requirement to be licensed. As at the end of May 2008, the Authority had issued over 248,000 licences and compliance is over 90 per cent. Its efficiency has, however, been hampered by poor forecasting of licensing demand and costs and difficulties with the computerised systems procured to process licence applications. When the Authority was created in 2003, the licence fee was set at £190 but it was costing the Authority £215 to process an application. As a result, the Authority needed an additional £17.4 million of public funding between 2004-05 and 2007-08 to carry out its work. In the winter of 2005-06, the Authority's original system for producing licences was unable to cope with the large number of later than planned applications the Authority received. In autumn 2007, the Authority's replacement system was not ready on time and a backlog of applications arose. These two problems resulted in the Authority incurring additional costs of £1 million. The Private Security Industry Act 2001 set up the Authority to regulate individuals, but in a number of other countries the equivalent bodies also regulate businesses. The NAO recommends that in addition to individuals all private security businesses should be registered with the Authority. The SIA has already started a feasibility study to consider the compulsory registration of private security companies.
Public Service Agreements (PSAs) are performance targets used to monitor departmental performance, improve service delivery and aid government accountability. Following on from a previous report (HCP 476, session 2004-05, ISBN 010293259X) published in March 2005, this NAO report examines the progress made by 18 government departments and the cross cutting Sure Start programme to establish robust data systems to measure and report performance against their 2003-06 PSA targets. It also highlights successful practices which have wider applicability and can improve the management of data systems across government. The report finds that progress has been variable in developing sound systems, and that difficulties must be overcome in order to realise the full benefits of PSA targets.
This report is a follow-up to the NAO's 2005 report on the Regeneration of the Millennium Dome and associated land (HC 178, session 2004-05, ISBN 9780102931662). The 2005 report examined the process for selling the Millennium Dome and associated land and the resulting deal and concluded that the resulting deal offered an integrated solution for the regeneration of the Greenwich Peninsula and offered the Government a sensible exit strategy from the Dome. The development is still at an early stage and faces inherent risks and challenges which mean it is only possible to come to firm conclusions about early progress compared to the initial plans, rather than on the longer term outcomes. The report finds that The Dome has become a highly successful entertainment venue and a beacon for a new community on the Peninsula. The wider redevelopment of the surrounding land has been less successful. Some commercial and educational developments are underway earlier than planned initially. The delivery of new housing has, however, fallen behind schedule. It will be difficult for the housing programme to recover the lost ground to meet original targets because the rate of building required to do so is very demanding. As a consequence of these delays, the taxpayer's likely return from the redevelopment has fallen significantly. The structure of the deal means that the delays have affected the taxpayer more than the private sector. The Government should consider whether future deals can be structured to align better the interests of the public and private sectors.
By September 2005, the prison population in England and Wales reached a record level of 77,300, an increase of 25,000 prisoners over the last ten years, resulting in increased levels of overcrowding and stretched resources. According to Home Office data for 2004, there were 141 people in custody per 100,000 of the population in England and Wales, compared to 98 per 100,000 in Germany and 93 per 100,000 in France. This NAO report examines how the National Offender Management Service (which has responsibility for managing and accommodating prisoners) is dealing with the pressure on places and the implications for performance, particularly the accuracy of Home Office projections of the future population and the impacts of overcrowding on the adult prison estate. The report does not deal with sentencing policy. Findings include that prison population projections have proved unreliable over the longer term; overcrowding is a particular problem for local prisons; the costs of temporarily holding prisoners in police cells have been considerable; and overcrowding disrupts prisoner rehabilitation programmes designed to prevent re-offending.
Anti-social behaviour encompasses a broad range of behaviours including nuisance behaviour, intimidation and vandalism. Seventeen per cent of the population perceive high levels of anti-social behaviour in their area, with the young and the less well off being disproportionately affected, at a cost to government agencies of responding to reports of anti-social behaviour in England and Wales of around £3.4 billion per year. This report examines the work of the Home Office's Anti-Social Behaviour Unit set up in 2003 and measures introduced by the Home Office since 1997 to tackle anti-social behaviour, focusing on the impact of three of the most commonly used interventions: warning letters, Acceptable Behaviour Contracts and Anti-Social Behaviour Orders. Using a sample of 893 cases, the report found that the majority of people who received one of these interventions did not re-engage in anti-social behaviour, but there were a number of perpetrators for whom interventions had limited impact, with about 20 per cent of the sample having received 55 per cent of the interventions issued. Recommendations include that the Home Office should undertake formal evaluation of the success of different interventions and the impact of combining these with support services at the local level. International research suggests that preventive programmes, such as education, counselling and training can be a cost effective way of addressing anti-social behaviour.
The UK retains responsibility for 14 overseas territories, 11 of which are permanently populated and opt to remain under British sovereignty. These territories are not constitutionally part of the UK. They have their own constitutions, legal systems and most have a democratically elected government. Most of these territories also share common features, including relative isolation, exposure to disasters and dependence on one or two key industries. The great majority of territory citizens are entitled to full British Citizenship. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office leads overall policy and maintains the main UK presence in the territories. The NAO's last report on this subject was in 1997 (HCP 13, session 1997-98, ISBN 9780102610987). This report reviews subsequent progress. It considers whether UK government departments work effectively in conjunction with territory governments to manage and mitigate risk. Whether there are suitable and sufficient resources available by the UK Government to manage the risk to the UK from its relationship with overseas territories. The report sets out a number of recommendations, including: that other UK government departments should be required to set out their arrangements for dealing with overseas territory issues; the FCO with the support of relevant agencies, such as the Treasury, FSA, SOCA, should develop a strategy to ensure stronger investigative and prosecution capacity; that the FCO needs to make real progress in developing territory administration. The NAO further concludes that while some progress has been made in managing risk, the degree of success in individual territories and across key areas has been mixed.
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