The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) and the National Audit Office (NAO) are the heavyweight enforcers of governmental financial accountability. As a civil servant or minister, you really do not want to mess with either. Their job is to scrutinise the execution of government policies on the basis of ‘just the facts’—and, more particularly, the figures behind the facts. Not for them the artful seduction of loquacious hype. And, despite a lot of precisely that sort of guff from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and HM Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS), both auditing bodies have maintained a sceptical focus with regards to the courts and tribunals reform programme—as maintained in the latest report of the PAC published in June.
The reports of both bodies are all the more powerful for the predominance of understatement. Here is the NAO in its latest report published in February: ‘HMCTS has a limited understanding of whether
