The Department for Communities and Local Government cannot demonstrate the success of the land disposal programme in addressing the housing shortage or achieving value for money because it does not collect information on the actual number of houses built or under construction, the proceeds from land sold, or whether the parcels of land were sold at market value. Instead, it chose to focus only on a notional number for 'potential' capacity for building houses on the land sold by individual departments in order to determine 'success'. The Department also counted towards the programme's target the capacity of land sold before the programme had even started. It did not collect basic information necessary to oversee the programme effectively and, where it did collect programme-level data, there were omissions and inconsistencies. With much greater ambitions for land disposals in the new Parliament, the Department must address the weaknesses in the current programme, and the Department has accepted that it needs to improve its general monitoring. If it is to oversee the new programme effectively then this must specifically include tracking sale proceeds and progress with the actual construction of new homes, and overseeing the programme in a way that gives Parliament and the taxpayer much greater assurance over the value for money achieved from all disposals

How public land has been stolen from us. Much has been written about Britain's trailblazing post-1970s privatization program, but the biggest privatization of them all has until now escaped scrutiny: the privatization of land. Since Margaret Thatcher took power in 1979, and hidden from the public eye, about 10 per cent of the entire British land mass, including some of its most valuable real estate, has passed from public to private hands. Forest land, defence land, health service land and above all else local authority land- for farming and school sports, for recreation and housing - has been sold off en masse. Why? How? And with what social, economic and political consequences? The New Enclosure provides the first ever study of this profoundly significant phenomenon, situating it as a centrepiece of neoliberalism in Britain and as a successor programme to the original eighteenth-century enclosures. With more public land still slated for disposal, the book identifies the stakes and asks what, if anything, can and should be done.

The General Practice Extraction Service (GPES) is an IT system designed to allow NHS organisations to extract data from all GP practice computer systems in England. This data would be used to monitor quality, plan and pay for health services and help medical research. The National Audit Office conducted an investigation into the service following concerns raised during a financial audit of the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC). The investigation found that the project had been delayed and only one customer, NHS England, had so far received data from GPES. Mistakes in the original procurement and contract management contributed to losses of public funds, through asset write-offs and settlements with suppliers. However, the need for the service remains and further public expenditure is needed to improve GPES or replace it. This inquiry will examine the procurement and development of the GPES system, the total expected cost of the GPES programme, which increased from £14 million to £40 million during planning and procurement, and how the capability of GPES can be used to provide a suitable data extraction service in the future.

We acknowledge that Universal Credit has stabilised and made progress since the previous Committee of Public Accounts first reported on the programme in 2013. However, there remains a long way to go. Implementation of Universal Credit so far has focussed mainly on the simplest cases and the Department for Work & Pensions has again delayed the programme. The completion date for the roll-out of its new digital service is six months later compared to when we looked at the programme only a year ago, and the Department now expects that Universal Credit will be fully operational in March 2021. The Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts that there will be a further six-month delay beyond the Department's latest planned end-date. We remain disappointed by the persistent lack of clarity and evasive responses by the Department to our inquiries, particularly about the extent and impact of delays. The Department's response to the previous Committee's recommendations in the February 2015 report Universal Credit: progress update do not convince us that it is committed to improving transparency about the programme's progress.

It is staggering that the government has given over £40 million to Kids Company over the past 13 years and still has no idea what it was getting for taxpayers' money. It was not part of this inquiry to assess the outcomes of Kids Company's work. We object to the obvious unfairness of central government directly funding a charity which operated in only two London boroughs for most of its existence, with around £4 million a year, at the expense of other charities and young people across the country. Despite repeated warnings and concerns about Kids Company's financial situation and the impact it was achieving, funding to the charity continued and was never seriously questioned, let alone stopped. Instead responsibilities were passed between departments like a hot potato. All the warning signs of a failed and expensive experiment had long been there but it was not until June 2015 that officials finally stood up to ministers, said enough was enough, and sought ministerial direction before providing more money. By then it was too late

In March 2015 HM Treasury agreed to sell its 40% stake in Eurostar for £585.1 million, almost double the valuations produced before the sale by both the government's project team and UBS its financial adviser. While some of this difference may be explained by the successful sale process and favourable market conditions, it is also further evidence of the government and its advisers undervaluing assets. We are also concerned about the seeming over-reliance by government on a small pool of costly advisers for asset sales. For example, UBS, the financial adviser for this transaction, was also involved in the sale of the Royal Mail and High Speed 1 (HS1). Eurostar also agreed, in a separate transaction, to redeem the government's preference share, providing a further £172 million for the taxpayer. The sale of the UK government's entire financial interest in Eurostar therefore generated proceeds of £757.1 million, significantly less than taxpayers' total financial investment in Eurostar which is estimated to have been some £3 billion. In October 2015, some two years later than expected, the Department for Transport published an evaluation of the economic impact and regeneration benefits for HS1. We are concerned that this delay has prevented the evaluation, which shows that the costs of HS1 far outweigh its quantified benefits, from being used to aid the scrutiny of other projects such as High Speed 2. Despite the results of its own evaluation, which it described as "world class", the Department maintains that there are further "wider wider benefits" from HS1 that it cannot yet value which make the investment worthwhile.

Survival rates for cancer patients in England have generally been worse than those in other high-income countries in Europe, mainly because patients in England tend to be diagnosed later and have poorer access to treatment. The government set up the Cancer Drugs Fund in 2010 to improve access to cancer drugs that would not otherwise be routinely available on the NHS. In the last five years about 80,000 people received drugs through the Fund. However, the Department of Health and NHS England do not have the data needed to assess the impact of the Fund on patient outcomes, such as extending patients' lives, or to demonstrate whether this is a good use of taxpayers' money. NHS England overspent the Fund's �480 million budget for the two years 2013-14 and 2014-15 by �167 million. The cost of the Fund grew from �175 million in 2012-13 to �416 million in 2014-15, an increase of 138% in two years, but NHS England did not start to take action to control the cost until November 2014. There is agreement that the Fund is not sustainable in its current form and NHS England and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) are currently consulting on proposals to reform the Fund from April 2016. We expect NHS England, in making changes, to take account of our recommendations and apply the clear lessons from the last five years to ensure that the new Fund is managed better in the future.