There is no information on the total cost to government of assurance but we estimate that in 2008-09 the cost of assuring high risk projects was £8.3 million.8 Seventy per cent of these costs relate to Gateway reviews.9
There are 628 people accredited to perform high risk Gateway reviews. Just over 75 per cent are civil servants, and the remainder are consultants, but in 2008-09 civil servants accounted for only 51 per cent of reviewer days. Only 38 civil servants are accredited to lead high risk reviews compared with 119 consultants. Our analysis of the 222 civil service reviewers used in 2008-09 indicates that 60 per cent were drawn from just five organisations - HM Treasury Group, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills10, Ministry of Justice, Home Office and Ministry of Defence.
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8 Our estimates indicate that £5.3 million (60 per cent of costs) is borne by departments and includes project staff time contributing to reviews, cost of providing reviewers to other projects and spending on consultants (for Gateway). The £3 million (40 per cent of costs) borne by OGC includes cost of managing the assurance system (for example training and development of mechanisms), cost of providing reviewers from OGC, and the cost of consultancy for all mechanisms bar Gateway.
9 We used data held by OGC and data generated during our stakeholder workshops to estimate the total cost of providing assurance. We tested a sample of OGC's data to validate accuracy and triangulated the estimates provided during the workshops with additional perspectives provided directly to us from three major project teams.
10 Formerly the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform.