Treasury unveils plan to speed up delivery of government projects
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Treasury minister Steve Barclay has unveiled the government’s plan to make his department “the new radicals” and transform Whitehall’s decision making processes.
Barclay told centre-right think tank Onward today that the Treasury would become more like a Silicon Valley company by ensuring public sector projects operate at greater speed and by using better data to make decisions.
The speech gave more details about the government’s plan to “level up” the country by investing in economically deprived areas of the UK.
Barclay spoke about his own frustration in the past of seeing “a seven-year gap between funding being approved for a road scheme and for the first truck to arrive”, and vowed for this to never happen again.
The chief secretary to the Treasury said the government’s plan would revolve around having a more clearly defined set of intended outcomes before choosing projects and delivering projects at greater speed.
Barclay used examples of the government’s furlough scheme and Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS) as examples of government incentives that were recently implemented at great pace.
He added that the government planned to “demonstrate how the use of real time data delivers a better service to the public”.
Barclay said the changes would see Boris Johnson’s government break from the past and invest in high-risk, high-reward projects.
“We will be leaving an era of spreadsheets and create a smarter and faster culture across Whitehall,” he said.
The plan coincides with a spending review and review of the Treasury’s green book, both launched by chancellor Rishi Sunak.
The green book provides guidance to the Treasury on how to assess which public projects to invest in.
Barclay said the green book would be changed to choose projects in more economically deprived areas in the North and the Midlands, and that spending would no longer be done purely through cost-benefit analyses.
“Spending decisions cannot be based solely on cost-benefit ratios assessed n silence, there must be room for more balanced judgements that take account of the transformational prospect of investment.”
On the spending review, he added: “The spending review will seek to accelerate our adoption of modern measures of construction and link funding to schemes that prioritise it.”