Mr Boffin speaks as one who has clearly been there! But he also has the kernel of his answer to why Treasury behaves so apparently irrationally in his piece:
"the Treasury would allow variance on (provided it was made up within a certain timeframe)"
I suspect that the Treasury would say something like:
"Yes, but every time we've tried this, Department X never actually gets around to paying the money back, and we get stuffed."
What you're talking about would be described as "Inverse End-Year Flexibility", and I'm aware of it only once (to the Foreign Office for a capital programme a few years back).
If MoD were to have a central pot of unallocated cash, as opposed to programming overspends every year leading to in-year cuts becoming inevitable, then perhaps the Treasury and the rest of Whitehall would be slightly more understanding.
As boring as it sounds, the NAO's MoD Financial Management Report (
Strategic Financial Management of the Defence Budget) provides lots of areas for MoD to improve. Bill Jeffrey as PUS and Accounting Officer should be ashamed.
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