In March 2015, the Cabinet Office published a paper on the principles of transparency for public contracts, which set out the government’s expectation that all ‘strategic suppliers’ provide it with bi-annual open-book data for contracts over £20m.

However, the audit watchdog says open-book accounting data is currently available in only 31% of contracts and that, even then, it is not always received. According to the NAO’s survey, only 23% of government organizations have a policy on when to use open-book accounting, whereas it wants every government department to have a policy on when it will use this option.

The NAO says the government should negotiate the retro-fitting of open-book access rights into old contracts, where appropriate, pointing out that in 2002, following NAO work, the Treasury successfully negotiated such a retrospective agreement for PFI contracts and the sharing of refinancing gains.