28. To ensure that authorities have the capability to achieve value for money at contract award and to maintain it, the OGC had introduced the Gateway Review process in February 2000. All civil central government projects were required to go through that process and a similar process for local authority projects was under consideration. Part of the Gateway Review process is to give the OGC a much sharper insight on where good things are happening so that it can encourage other authorities to replicate them. The Gateway Review process focuses attention on the early life of projects, where the OGC considers there is greater scope for management to take corrective action. The OGC told us that accounting officers were paying a lot of attention to the recommendations that were emerging from the Gateway Reviews.50
29. Asked whether authorities were allowed to go ahead with a project unless they had been given clearance and understood the risks, the OGC told us that the Gateway Review process would enable projects to be reviewed before contracts were signed. If it felt a department was doing something which was fundamentally not conducive to value for money, then the OGC had escalation routes to draw the matter to the attention of the Chief Secretary of the Treasury or the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It preferred, however, to deal with these matters on a face to face basis with departments, winning over their hearts and minds rather than instructing them what to do.51
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50 Qs140-141