National Audit Office Good Practice Guide For Managing The Commercial Lifecycle

Find out more on our website: https://bit.ly/3J39Laq The government’s response to the covid-19 global pandemic has drawn renewed, and possibly unprecedented, attention to public procurement practice and commercial outcomes. UK annual public expenditure on goods and services routinely exceeds £206 billion per year, the risks and opportunities to deliver value for money for the taxpayer merits ongoing focus by all public authorities and their suppliers. The National Audit Office is the parliamentary watchdog for value for money in public expenditure and the external auditor of central government, and has published a series of high-profile reports on government performance. The NAO has also published a good practice guidance that reflects upon findings and recommendations drawn from 209 reports concerning 350 commercial arrangements that it has published over the past 20 years – including recent examinations of commercial activities triggered in response to the global pandemic. Download the full report here. Speaker: Matthew Rees is Director of the NAO’s Commercial Hub, which leverages the NAO’s wide range of parliamentary reports about government performance to provide insights across public procurement and commercial arrangements, corporate finance and regulation. Matthew has led a wide range of NAO studies, including the use of supply chain finance in the NHS, the privatisation of Royal Mail, the UK guarantees scheme for infrastructure investment and landscapes of government companies and financial institutions. Matthew qualified at KPMG, where he worked on public sector audit before moving to corporate finance and investment banking. He has served as a NED at Gemserv Limited, a business process outsourcing company, and is a member of the ICAEW’s Supervisory Council. His public sector career spans Competition and Markets Authority, Ofwat and the Single Source Regulations Office.