Auditor-General's report and letter published [7/3/17]

The Auditor-General’s report Medium-term planning in government departments: Four-year planswas presented to the House of Representatives today.

Since 2011, government departments have been required each year to produce a four-year plan that sets out their medium-term strategy. Medium- to long-term planning is good practice in a well-developed public management system, and the introduction of four-year plans is consistent with that good practice. Although these plans are just one element of planning and performance management, they have a role in signalling the medium-term outlook of individual departments, sectors, and the Government as a whole.

For this report, we reviewed some four-year plans to see whether they appropriately set out a department’s medium-term view of where it was heading, what it would look like in the future, and how it would get there.

The practice of preparing four-year plans is still evolving. Several elements of departments’ preparation of their plans were pleasing. However, we identified some areas for improvement:

• knowing the purpose of a four-year plan and its intended audience to ensure a plan’s usefulness;
• fully integrating the preparation of four-year plans into broader strategic-planning processes;
• providing good information about intended trade-offs (for example, changes to funding levels and service levels); and
• providing clearer information on capital and asset management for all the Votes and appropriations administered by a department.

The central agencies and departments need to do more work to achieve a consistently good standard of four-year plans throughout government. We encourage departments and the central agencies to consider our suggestions for improvements so these plans can become increasingly useful and used.

A two-page summary is also available.

AgResearch Future Footprint Project: our targeted review of the updated business case
We have also published a letter on our website that sets out the findings of our targeted review of the updated business case for AgResearch’s Future Footprint Project. This letter follows up on the results of our 2015 review of the original business case.