The government’s corporate knowledge about the health of key sectors and companies may be vulnerable because of the high turnover of civil servants in this field, who may have 17 Correspondence from HM Treasury to Committee, 30 January 2024 18 C&AG’s Report, para 1.8 19 Q23 20 C&AG’s Report, para 2.15 21 National Audit Office (NAO) Report, Good practice guide: Monitoring and responding to companies in distress, October 2023, page 10 22 C&AG’s Report, para 2.17 23 Qq13,27; C&AG’s Report, para 6 24 Q12–13 25 Q23 26 Qq 41–43 12 Monitoring and responding to companies in distress built trusted relationships with the private sector and be skilled at handling information “sensitively and carefully”.27 The Cabinet Office told us that the last time it had a company it needed to look at, the Chief Operating Officer for the Civil Service wrote to all departments to nominate a single point of responsibility in their operations team. It told us that “it is important to have someone in departments so we can have a Government-wide call.”28 Despite this, it explained that next time there is a similar case, this will need to be updated because “doubtless people will have moved on.” The Treasury also explained to us how its spending teams are formally alerted when a department is seeking to make any sort of financial contribution to a company.29 We have previously raised concerns about the high staff turnover in the Treasury and a lack of operational experience at more junior levels of the Treasury spending teams.30 Analysis of the latest civil service statistics shows that the Treasury has the highest turnover rate of all departments.31 The Treasury told us that it had launched a corporate finance network as one way of maintaining institutional memory, and that there is a regular permanent secretaries’ group focused on growth where it shares its guidance and principles on company distress situations, to be cascaded to teams across the civil service.32