Mr. Andrew Brownlee:

I want to emphasise that the timeliness and governance issues are completely and utterly unacceptable to the HEA. We could not be clearer about that. There are issues around timeliness which the Comptroller and Auditor General acknowledged are particular to higher education accounts relating to recognition of research income, the dual audit requirement in universities, the recognition of particular assets and so forth. Those aside, however, there is no excuse for the fact this committee is looking at the 2013 and 2014 accounts in 2017. To some extent we are dealing with legacy issues. I understand from talking to the Comptroller and Auditor General that his office is satisfied with where the institutions are at in terms of their responsiveness to updating the accounts. I also want to stress that we have put in place a governance framework for higher education over the last two years which has involved a number of steps to provide further reassurance. It involves things like regular liaison and reporting with the Comptroller and Auditor General and an early warning system. We now have financial contracts in place with the higher education institutions that insist on those institutions having their draft accounts ready within six months of the year end. We have established rolling reviews to look at particular governance issues. The first one was on procurement because we recognise that procurement across the higher education sector is not good enough. We have revised our annual governance reporting templates to take account of all the issues around governance that are becoming apparent. We take it absolutely seriously. We have new reporting arrangements in place with the Department of Education and Skills around a risk register, financial accountability framework and a system performance framework. We take this issue very seriously and have been working on it. Undoubtedly there are legacy issues to deal with but we are completely committed to doing that.