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The National Audit Office may need additional resources to carry out investigations into “distributed services” in the health and education sectors, according to its comptroller and auditor general Amyas Morse. With the creation of academies and clinical commissioning groups, for example, the number of service providers accountable to Parliament is growing fast.

Government contracts should be audited by the National Audit Office (NAO) to improve transparency about public service outsourcing, business organisation the CBI has said.

More than three years after its launch, the government’s Fraud, Error and Debt agenda is now moving fast – leading to much more coordinated action across government. Suzannah Brecknell reports on progress

The Treasury should consider implementing new “funding mechanisms that better incentivise departments to recover debt” as part of a clear strategy for reducing the amount of overdue debt owed to central government, according to a report published last week by the National Audit Office.

The majority of civil servants – 61% – have not seen faster progress on reforms to create a modern workplace since this agenda was highlighted as a priority by the cabinet secretary last July, according to a survey carried out by CSW.

The new Competition & Markets Authority will referee our markets, boosting competition to support both economic growth and government outsourcing projects. Chief executive Alex Chisholm talks to Suzannah Brecknell

The Government Digital Service (GDS) plans to replace CloudStore – the electronic marketplace which allows government and wider public sector organisations to buy cloud-based services – with a new portal that has greater capacity and new features.

Educationalists are being artificially divided into two opposing camps, damaging continuity in education, the former Department for Education permanent secretary Sir David Bell has told CSW.

The G-Cloud promises to bring efficiencies and cost savings to central government. But how easy is it to buy from the cloud? A recent roundtable explored the issue, as Tim Gibson reports.

Jil Matheson, the national statistician, head of the Government Statistical Service chief executive of the UK Statistics Authority, is to retire this summer, it has recently been announced.

Sue Owen might be enjoying more evenings out as the new permanent secretary at DCMS, but her days are spent demonstrating and improving the value of culture, media and sport to the UK. Suzannah Brecknell meets her

Recruitment to the public sector looks set to flatline in the next three months, according to the Manpower Employment Outlook survey published on Tuesday, after rising earlier this year.

Home Affairs committee chair Keith Vaz has thanked Home Office permanent secretary Mark Sedwill for his “extremely positive” interventions to help the committee secure information from his department, but raised concerns about officials’ willingness to supply data in some of the department’s directorates.

Departments are submitting key documents to the Public Accounts Committee at the last minute, and this is “just not satisfactory”, PAC chair Margaret Hodge has told CSW.

The education department has “achieved clear progress on a policy priority” by opening 174 free schools since 2010, and has used new approaches to deliver “much lower average construction costs than in previous programmes,” according to a National Audit Office report published today.

Three-quarters of former secretaries of state surveyed by Civil Service World support the calls for a commission to consider how the civil service should develop and reform.

The government wants to give ministers more power in Whitehall; others have called for a major review of our civil service. Asking the views of former secretaries of state, Suzannah Brecknell encountered sympathy for both ideas.

Stephan Shakespeare, author of a government report on the better use of public sector information, has supported calls to amend the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act to guarantee the future of the open data agenda.

David Thomas (pictured), commerical director at HMRC and a crown representative, will leave government in mid-December. He resigned his post in September.

The civil service must “significantly” improve its ability to understand company accounts if it is to make effective use of open-book contracts, according to government chief operating officer Stephen Kelly and chief procurement officer Bill Crothers.

The annual Civil Service People Survey (CSPS) shows increased satisfaction with training opportunities this year, but another fall in scores associated with pay and benefits.

The Civil Service Commission has published the rules under which individuals can be appointed as civil servants providing support in Extended Ministerial Offices (EMOs). The rules, welcomed by the FDA trade union, set out a number of safeguards designed to ensure that appointments do not compromise the independence of the civil service.

Legislation giving the National Audit Office (NAO) access to the accounts of private companies delivering public services would be “extremely helpful”, Amyas Morse, the auditor general, said last week.

Just 9% of civil servants believe that ministers and senior managers “openly encourage challenge, debate and reporting of operational problems”, according to a survey carried out by CSW with marketing communications agency Claremont.

National statistician Jil Matheson yesterday told MPs of her “frustration” over the problems she’s had in accessing administrative data held by government departments.

Sharon White, currently director general for public services, has been appointed as the second permanent secretary at HM Treasury.

Statisticians’ status across government has dropped, according to Hetan Shah, chief executive of the Royal Statistical Society.

Data is increasingly important for the public sector, but trust in public statistics is falling. Hetan Shah, head of the Royal Statistical Society, talks to Suzannah Brecknell about the importance, and the limits, of statistics

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is investigating whether there is enough competition in the public sector IT market. 

The proportion of women in the senior civil service (SCS) has risen in the last year, but government has failed to meet its own target, set in a 2008 diversity strategy, to have 39% women in the SCS by March 2013.

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Government’s “default setting” should be to “publish the evidence and the data on which policy is based,” according to Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude – but departments should not be “limited” to introducing policies with a strong evidence base.

Senior managers should make time to meet apprentices who have joined the civil service under a new Apprenticeship Fast Track scheme, the head of the civil service has said.

Chris Last has become the full-time head of government HR, reporting directly to the head of the civil service as he leads work to strengthen cross-government HR management and services.

A  project to provide low-cost toilets to poor urban communities in Ghana is among the shortlisted entries for the this year's Civil Service Awards , held in association with Ernst & Young and Huawei.

Government’s Major Projects Portfolio is regularly assessed to look for warning signs that indicate a programme is going awry. CSW has researched key projects in four departments to gauge the performance of civil service project managers.