Financial management of fees and charges

HM Treasury should: a) ensure that disclosure requirements are aligned between Managing Public Money and the Financial Reporting Manual, and that the requirements support transparency and accountability while being proportionate in their level of detail relative to their risk to public money;

HM Treasury should: b) extend its guidance in chapter six of Managing Public Money to include: a template to standardise the process of proposing or amending fees and charges; additional support on data collection, strategic decision-making, and monitoring; and the relative merits of alternative approaches where appropriate;

HM Treasury should: c) determine how incentives and levers can be used to encourage greater efficiencies or quality improvements, especially where there may be opportunities to transform customer service or invest to save;

HM Treasury should: d) assess options, including legislative approaches, to streamline and make more flexible the fee amendment process to better support government bodies in their financial management of fees and charges; and

HM Treasury should: e) set out what action it will take to better support good financial management of fees and charges across government with good practice, tools, guidance and examples on issues like navigating trade-offs and addressing data limitations

Accounting Officers should proactively monitor whether charged services are recovering costs, and act where they persistently deliver unplanned surpluses or deficits, or fail to comply with the principles of Managing Public Money. This should include ensuring they have the appropriate legislative and Treasury approvals for their approach so that the regularity of the expenditure can be effectively audited and transparently presented to Parliament.