Supporting Government’s Response To Covid And Brexit

We were engaged by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) to provide commercial and operational delivery support to the directorate general accountable for Government’s support for businesses of all sizes with respect to Covid and Brexit.

In that capacity, we conducted an objective assurance review of the programme through which Government had, by then, provided more than £20bn in grants to support small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) through the pandemic.

To provide colleagues with constructive, pragmatic advice and challenge on a scheme which had been mobilised at great pace – and which was working with incredible intensity – we:

• Met with senior officials accountable for the scheme to ensure that we understood the context, goals, and known compromises which had been made to mobilise the scheme at the pace, and to the scale, required to meet the unique demands of the moment.
• Conducted an extensive desk-based review of programme documentation, such that we built a strong understanding of the scheme before we engaged with overstretched colleagues, and so that we could optimise the value of the time we would spend with them.
• Met colleagues involved in all aspects of the scheme’s design, delivery, governance and reporting to explore their experience and insights about the scheme – and to consider the questions and concerns that we built through our desk-based review.
• Considered our emerging thinking against what we knew would be the (then) Infrastructure and Project Authority and National Audit Office’s expectation of a scheme of this scale, and involving the administration of such huge sums of public money.
• Prepared a report and recommendations for the relevant directors general in BEIS and the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) on the strengths, issues, risks, and immediate actions which could be taken to strengthen the scheme’s operation.

We were then asked to support the programme team to implement our recommendations and strengthen the operational footings on which they would continue to deliver.  We:

• Designed and supported mobilisation of a best practice programme and risk management office to sit across the scheme and provide the necessary grip.
• Worked with relevant colleagues to quickly document ‘as is’ business processes - identifying issues, risks, and opportunities for efficiency and improvement at a granular level.
• Worked with the Department’s analytical community to interrogate programme data, and the ways in which data was being collected, managed, and reported on.
• Designed ‘to be’ processes, including simple, rapidly deployable changes that would make it materially easier for programme colleagues to manage the volume and values involved.
• Supported colleagues to implement those changes, including by provided them with the embedded capacity and capability required to do so at pace.

Our work included careful consideration of the crucial, customer / business-facing role which local authorities played in the programme – and the need for BEIS to make the programme as simple and efficient as possible for them to administer, at pace, to get support to businesses.

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