The Occupied Royal Palaces Estate (the Estate), which includes Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, is held in trust for the nation and used to support the official duties of The Sovereign. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport is accountable to Parliament for the upkeep of the Estate, but has delegated day to day responsibility to the Royal Household. The annual grant to maintain and run the Palaces has remained at around £15 million since 2000-01 (a 19 per cent real terms reduction). An increase in running costs over the same period means there has been a 27 per cent fall in maintenance expenditure to £11.1 million in 2007-08. The Department has set the Household an objective which focuses on the condition of the Estate, but none of the key indicators measures performance against it, and the Household does not have a comprehensive analysis of the condition of the Estate. In addition, a £32 million maintenance backlog has built up and important work has been deferred. The Department and the Household have yet to agree criteria for assessing the backlog and develop a plan for managing it. In addition, the Household does not have a strategy for managing its Estate. The Royal Collection Trust (the Trust) manages visitor admission to the Palaces and receives the income generated, which in 2007-08 totalled £28 million. Buckingham Palace is open for 63 days because of the number of official engagements and the costs involved. Other buildings such as the White House and Houses of Parliament manage to open for most of the year, despite similar obligations and security concerns.

The Occupied Royal Palaces Estate is held in trust for the nation and is used to support the official duties of the Sovereign. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is ultimately responsible for the upkeep of the Estate but in 1991 delegated to the Royal Household the responsibility for running and maintaining the Estate. The Household does so through the Property Services Department and receives grant-in-aid, £15 million in 2007-08, broadly the same level of funding as in 2000-01, which is a reduction of 19 per cent in real terms. This report examines how the Property Section plans and delivers its maintenance work and the impact the Property Section's running costs and income generated from the Estate had on the funding available to spend on maintenance. The DCMS does not currently have a clear basis for assessing the extent to which its aim of maintaining the Palaces to a standard consistent with their royal, architectural and historic status is being achieved. The Property Section has identified a backlog of maintenance work, but there is not yet an agreement between the parties about how the backlog should be measured or how to manage it. The Property Section has recently strengthened its approach to planning maintenance work and put in place the key elements of a sound maintenance strategy. In 2007-08 the Property Section generated almost £3 million from visitors to Windsor Castle and from renting out accommodation on the estate. The Royal Household's approach to generating income could be strengthened by developing a formal Estate strategy.

The Sovereign Grant Act 2011 which came into effect from 1 April 2012 consolidated the funding provided to support the official duties of the Queen and maintain the Occupied Royal Palaces that up to 31 March 2012 had been provided under the Civil List and the Grants-in-aid for the maintenance of the Occupied Royal Palaces, Royal Travel and Communications and Information. The Queen's official expenditure is met from public funds in exchange for the surrender by The Queen of the revenue from the Crown Estate. The Sovereign Grant was set at 31.0 million pounds for 2012-13. Official expenditure met by this Grant in 2012-13 amounted to 33.3 million pounds, an increase of 0.9 million (2.6 percent) in absolute terms and a decrease of 0.2 percent in real terms compared to the previous year. The equivalent of the excess of expenditure over the Sovereign Grant of 2.3 million in 2012-3 was drawn down from the Sovereign Grant Reserve. From 2013-14 the Sovereign Grant will be calculated based on 15 percent of the income account net surplus of the Crown Estate for the financial year two years previous. The Crown Estate surplus for the financial year 2011-12 amounted to 240.2 million pounds thereby producing a Sovereign Grant of 36.1 million for 2013-14

In 2001, the newly established Learning and Skills Council (the Council) took over a programme of capital works in the further education sector, to renew an estate that was too large, with much of it in poor condition and no longer fit for modern educational purposes. By March 2008, a total of £4.2 billion of projects had been approved 'in detail', including grant support from the Council of £1.7 billion, and about half of the estate had been renewed. Since April 2008, there has been a very serious failure in the management of the programme. It approved 'in principle' 79 colleges' projects, which required nearly £2.7 billion of Council funding more than it could afford. Before the current problems arose, the programme had achieved some successes, enabling the estate to be reduced in size, and the buildings are generally of good quality and are contributing to increased learner participation. The economic downturn could affect colleges' ability to fund projects by restricting their access to loan finance or their ability to sell surplus assets. The indebtedness of the sector is rising. The Council needs to monitor closely the financial health of some colleges, particularly those that have borrowings that exceed 40 per cent of their annual income. In 2010, the Council is expected to be dissolved and its functions taken over by the Skills Funding Agency and the Young People's Learning Agency. There needs to be clarity about responsibilities for the capital programme, and additional administrative burdens on colleges must be avoided.

A Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) is an area of land containing habitats and wildlife which are of national or international importance. There are over 4,000 SSSI sites in England, protected through restrictions on activities and development which would adversely affect the sites. In 2000, the Department agreed a Public Service Agreement (PSA) target to bring 95 per cent of SSSI land area into a 'favourable' or 'recovering' condition by December 2010. The reported condition of sites has increased from 52 per cent of land area in target condition in December 2002 to 86 per cent in February 2009. The programme of SSSI condition assessments is not up-to-date and Natural England has put in place a programme of work to address the backlog of assessments by 2010, and has introduced quality assurance systems and guidelines to improve the consistency of its record keeping. Public expenditure on SSSIs has more than doubled over the past eight years, from £35.6 million a year in 2000-01 to £85.4 million in 2008-09. Financial incentives to encourage private landowners to conserve sites account for some 58 per cent of public expenditure. There is scope to improve the processes for identifying new sites and declassifying existing ones which are no longer of special interest.

In 2007-08, HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) collected around £450 billion in tax and National Insurance contributions from 35 million taxpayers. At 31 March 2008 the Department was owed £17.3 billion in outstanding tax, interest and penalties, £4.5 billion of which was more than a year old. Debts arise when people or businesses forget to pay, do not understand the need to pay or deliberately try to avoid or delay payment. Most tax payments are made on time, but during 2007-2008 30 per cent of tax payments were made after they were due, the number of tax debts increased by 22 per cent and the level and age of debt increased on some taxes. HMRC needs to change the behaviour of taxpayers who persistently pay late. HMRC could do more to encourage prompt payment and it also lags behind best practice in recovering debt. For example, it does not risk score its debtors. Risk scoring would allow it to tailor the help it gives to those who do not understand their obligations or are in financial crisis, while dealing promptly with debtors who deliberately pay late. HMRC is also unable to automatically link debts owed on different taxes by the same taxpayer. In managing tax debt, HMRC must balance the need to maximise revenue for the Exchequer with that of offering support to individuals and businesses in temporary financial difficulty. Balancing these objectives becomes more difficult in a recession. Since launching the Business Payment Support Service in November 2008, HMRC had - by February 2009 - agreed over 60,000 'time to pay' arrangements with individual businesses, worth £1 billion in deferred tax.

The Department for Children, Schools and Families' Building Schools for the Future Programme (BSF) plans to renew every secondary school in the country, by rebuilding half of them, structurally remodelling 35 per cent, refurbishing 15 per cent and providing Information Communication Technology to all. Its aim is to use capital investment in new buildings as a catalyst to improve educational outcomes. The Department estimates that the programme will cost £52-£55 billion over its lifetime. The Department was over-optimistic in its original planning assumptions for BSF: of the 200 schools originally planned to be completed by December 2008, only 42 had been by that date. The Department now expects the programme to take 18 years, with the last school completed in 2023. Local authorities are responsible for the local delivery of BSF. They plan, procure and manage the BSF school buildings. In 2004, the Department established Partnerships for Schools to manage the national delivery of the programme. The Department and Partnerships for Schools encourage local authorities to procure their schools through a Local Education Partnership. These are 10-year partnerships to procure a flow of projects, structured as joint ventures between the local authority, a consortium of private companies that build, finance and maintain schools, and Building Schools for the Future Investments. It is too early to conclude whether BSF will achieve its educational objectives. To date, over-optimism has meant the programme could not live up to expectations. Establishing Partnerships for Schools to manage the programme centrally has helped local authorities to deliver more effectively, but while Local Education Partnerships have potential advantages, their value for money is yet to be proven. And it will be very challenging to deliver all schools by 2023.

The BBC, in 2007-08, spent £462 million on its 16 radio stations. The BBC has set these 16 stations a combined target of efficiency savings of £69 million over the five year period to March 2013, representing an annual saving of 3 per cent. The BBC proposed unacceptable constraints on the Comptroller and Auditor General's access to information and his discretion to report to his findings to Parliament. The situation arose because the Comptroller and Auditor General does not have statutory unrestricted rights of access to the BBC, which he does with all other publicly funded bodies. The BBC has wide ranges of costs for similar programmes within and between its radio stations. The average cost for an hour of comparable music programmes on Radio 2 is more than 50 per cent higher than on Radio 1. For most breakfast and 'drivetime' slots, the BBC's costs are significantly higher than commercial stations, largely because of payments to presenters. The BBC has not used cost comparisons across its own programmes, or against commercial radio, to identify scope for efficiencies. The BBC uses its principal value for money indicator-cost per listener hour-to justify the cost of presenters on the basis of audience size, but the indicator does not provide assurance that programme costs are the minimum necessary to reach the required quality and intended audience. For most radio programmes, presenters' salaries represent the majority of programming costs, but the BBC is paying more than the market price for its top radio presenters. The BBC has prevented full public scrutiny of the value for money of expenditure on presenters by agreeing confidentiality clauses with some presenters.

Housing developments require the approval of planning applications by local planning authorities (Authorities) before they can proceed. The Department for Communities and Local Government has implemented a number of measures in recent years to improve the performance of the development management stage of the planning process, in which applications are considered by Authorities, and to boost planning capacity. The measures include the setting of national targets for the speed of Authority decision-making, and the allocation of £68 million a year in Planning Delivery Grant (the Grant) to Authorities as a reward for meeting targets. The Grant, together with the setting of a 13 week target for decisions, has provided Authorities with an incentive to determine applications more quickly. Between 2002-03 and 2007-08, the percentage of major residential planning applications decided within 13 weeks almost doubled to 67 per cent. The Department's measures to improve the application process have met with mixed success. The Department has encouraged Authorities to hold pre-application discussions with developers, but there is a lack of clarity across Authorities about the purpose of these discussions. Some Authorities have not deployed sufficiently senior and experienced staff in the discussions, and Authorities have also taken different approaches to charging. Authorities' monitoring of developers' discharge of the conditions attached to planning permissions has been given a low priority, partly because of the focus on meeting the 13 week decision target. Authorities have spent about 95 per cent of Planning Delivery Grant on their planning functions, although the extent to which it has resulted in extra expenditure on planning is unclear.