Sponsoring departments: Good intentions,poor performance

The National Audit Act does not provide quite the role for the Comptroller & Auditor General that the original St John Stevas bill envisaged. Nevertheless, his recent investigation of the methods used by Departments to monitor and control the industries for which they are responsible shows that even his restricted remit can carry him into some hitherto unexplored areas. In the first report of this kind, covering the Departments of Energy, Industry, and Transport, Gordon Downey concentrated on the limited question of how well the system of control based on the 1978 White Paper was actually working.

As David Heald and David Steel argue in PUBLIC MONEY, June 1981, that system has come to be dominated by the essentially short‐run control mechanism, external financing limits. Not surprisingly, therefore, the investigation concentrated heavily on that. What it reveals is just how elastic this system of control is and just how weak a grip it affords Departments over what the industries actually do.