The Financial Management Award Shortlist

Spending Review Directorate, Department for Transport

DfT’s Spending Review Directorate (SRD) integrated excellent financial, economic and strategic analysis to deliver DfT’s contribution to the Coalition’s main objective of deficit reduction, while ensuring Transport contributes to economic growth and carbon reduction.

Before the election, DfT’s financial planning and strategy units collaborated on two efficiency exercises:
•    Alternative Planning Assumptions Framework (APAF); detailed analysis of all budget lines, establishing savings options and assessing impacts.
•    Discovery Projects; looking at strategic options for savings from radically different delivery models.

Building on this, the teams were brought together as SRD to run the spending review process. They quickly built a rigorous and detailed financial planning model. This allowed detailed scrutiny of budgets, underpinning high-quality advice to the Secretary of State, informing his policy choices. SRD’s capital programme review built a very strong strategic case for investment in transport, demonstrating the outstanding economic returns.

Working collaboratively with Treasury, this authoritative evidence-base and detailed scrutiny allowed DfT to build compelling cases for protecting DfT’s capital budget over the SR period and maintaining large areas of resource spend while generating a 21 per cent saving.

Post-election, the two teams used the APAF and Discovery outputs to create new integrated decision-support models (including financial plans and risks, detailed saving choices and potential impacts). Consequently, officials quickly provided clear and detailed advice for new Ministers, showing that officials understood Ministerial priorities and provided trustworthy analysis..