A flagship government strategy designed to steer the UK's recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic has been dramatically abandoned following a blistering assessment from Whitehall's spending watchdog.
The National Audit Office (NAO) delivered a scathing verdict on the 'Government Recovery Strategy', revealing a stunning lack of clarity, weak accountability, and insufficient coordination across different departments. This has forced ministers into a major U-turn, binning the original plan entirely.
A Strategy Without Substance
The report, published this week, found the strategy was fatally flawed from the outset. It was launched with significant ambition but without a clear implementation plan or a way to measure its own success. Crucially, the NAO could find no evidence that the government had even defined what 'a recovered state' would actually look like for the nation.
Gareth Davies, the head of the NAO, stated the strategy was established without 'a clear means of measuring achievement of a recovered state or how it would be funded.' This lack of basic groundwork rendered the entire initiative rudderless.
Whitehall's Coordination Failure
At the heart of the failure was the Cabinet Office's inability to effectively coordinate the sprawling effort across multiple government departments. The report highlighted that while the Cabinet Office was nominally in charge, it did not hold other departments to account for delivering on the strategy's goals.
This led to a fragmented approach where different arms of government were not pulling in the same direction, fundamentally undermining the national effort to rebuild after the immense societal and economic disruption of the lockdowns.
A New Plan and Lingering Questions
In response to the NAO's findings, a government spokesman confirmed the original strategy has now been retired. It will be replaced by a new approach focused on 'Government Transformation and Service Delivery'.
This embarrassing climbdown raises serious questions about the government's ability to learn lessons from the pandemic, especially as the UK Covid-19 public inquiry continues its critical work. The episode suggests that deep-seated issues in Whitehall regarding planning, accountability, and cross-departmental cooperation remain unresolved.
