Departments must have, or be able to access, the skills, expertise and capacity needed through the whole lifecycle of any intervention in a company, including to prepare for and respond to company distress scenarios.56 We have repeatedly highlighted longstanding issues with a lack of specialist skills in the civil service and the challenges with attracting and retaining specialist staff.57 We recently found in our 2023 Bulb Energy report that the need for commercial and corporate finance skills across government has increased but these are in limited supply.58 We highlighted the importance of all departments being able to access these skills to make appropriate judgements concerning activities that link the public and private sectors. Our report on Competition in public procurement raised concerns that the government may not fully understand the commercial skills and 51 Q59 52 Qq64–65 53 C&AG’s Report, paras 3.1, 3.7–3.8 54 Qq67–68; NAO Report, page 20 55 Dr John Tribe (Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Liverpool) (LGD0001) 56 NAO Report, page 7; C&AG’s Report, Figure 1 57 Committee of Public Accounts, Specialist skills in the civil service, Thirty-Second Report of Session 2019–21, HC 686, 7 December 2020, Summary 58 Committee of Public Accounts, Bulb Energy, Seventy-Fourth Report of Session 2022–23, HC 1232, 1 November 2023, Conclusions and recommendations, para 5 16 Monitoring and responding to companies in distress capabilities needed across government to implement far-reaching changes to the public procurement landscape.59 We have also highlighted the variability in departments’ risk management capabilities.60