The future of accounting

This year’s holidays have proven to be an excellent reading opportunity, and one of the highlights was Robert Peston’s WTF? (Hodder & Stoughton, 2017).  It included the remarkable statistic, as reported by the Bank of England's chief economist Andrew Haldane, that accountants had a 95% probability of vocational extinction.  This was after I had read that accounting was one of the most in-demand vocations around.  So, to quote Robert Peston, wtf?

We can start with acknowledging that there is currently a very high level of demand for accountants, and this is a recurring headline within the profession.  But what of the future?  That is where the uncertainty lies.  In 2013, a US study categorised jobs by the risk of automation, i.e. the extent to which the types of processes involved in particular occupations could be carried out by robots.  The US study is based on a categorisation of job tasks, known as O*NET.  This is a database of over 900 occupations, which lists the nature of the role by tasks, technology skills, knowledge, skills, abilities, work activities and work context.  The current list of occupations dates from 2010.  The US study used the detailed information in O*NET to assess the likelihood of these roles being automated at some point in the future. 

The results, as the statistic quoted by Peston shows, are quite startling.  As a result, I tried to grasp some comfort by questioning the basis of the research.  Had O*NET correctly understood the role of an accountant?  Is the role of an accountant in the UK different to that in the USA?  Is the US employment context different to the UK?  Had the study correctly picked up the elevated role of a qualified accountant, as opposed to a finance clerk, or part-qualified accountant?

Tragically, there is no comfort in the answers to any of these questions.   The role description seems about right for most accountants and resembles what a UK accountant (as well as a US accountant) would do.  Nor can we take much comfort from the different labour market characteristics in the USA compared to the UK: the BBC helpfully converted the US study’s findings for a UK context, so that you could input your job title to understand your risk of occupational obsolescence (thanks, BBC!).  The overall result remains true: UK accountants have a 95% risk of obsolescence.  Hairdressers, it should be noted, are about 33%.  Finally, the US study has taken into account professional status, and while things are worse for less qualified accountants (book-keepers, who tend not to be fully qualified, are a 98% risk), they are not good for the rest: tax inspectors at 93%, accountants and auditors at 94%.

Peston also talks about the need for educational curricula to match future economic needs – so, we should avoid training people to do tasks at high risk of automation and focus on those areas where robots are least likely to take advantage (creative industries, media etc).  This seems a rational approach, but poses two questions relating to accounting:

·       First, why are students opting to study accounting in such large numbers when it is at such risk of automation?

·       Second, why are accounting courses so focussed on precisely those numeric tasks that are most likely to be automated first, rather than the judgemental tasks that might hold out for a bit longer?

The marketing of accounting degrees tends to emphasise the higher wages, potentially more exciting lifestyle (in terms of international work opportunities), and career trajectory, to encourage students onto courses.  And all of these factors seem to be borne out by current data – but not, it would seem, the future.  The risk is that we encourage students onto a ‘shooting star’ degree: bright for a short while, but then fizzling out into nothing.  So the question is: when will these future predictions of automation start to impact on the current jobs market?  The answer to that seems fairly unclear, but if the predictions are correct, we should start to see the market for accountants beginning to shrink.

The lesson from both the US study, and the account in Peston’s book, is that accountants need to focus on areas where their human skills are most required.  Granted, the US data does not suggest a substantial improvement in work prospects by so doing, but I would take a 94% risk of automation over a 98% risk.  So, how could accountants achieve this?  The obvious risk within accounting is the focus on numeric calculations – surely one area that could be automated, indeed has already been through significant processes of automation with the advent of accounting software.  Gone are the days of writing journals out by hand, or maintaining actual written ledgers, even though the terminology of accounting still refers to them.  Yet many people enter accounting precisely because they like numbers and calculations.  How do you tell students that the thing they most like about accounting is, in fact, its weakest link?

So, what should accountants focus on instead?  Following Peston’s analysis human skills in accountancy all relate to things like client management (in multiple settings), interpretation of the more judgemental aspects of financial reporting, or auditing assessments, and so on.  Even here, there is a risk that many judgements will be removed from human assessment purely because they are within a tolerable threshold of an industry average, and therefore require no further analysis.   But this sort of skill-set is still more useful for the managerial work contexts to which accountants aspire: even if you start by number-crunching, by the time you reach middle or senior management, it is how you relate to people that really matters.

Most debates about automation tend to focus on the general truth that technology benefits society, that although there are losers there are more winners.  The US study would suggest that accounting will be a loser in the current process of technological change.  So how has it been received within the profession?  Debate within accounting circles has tended to focus on how, if true, this outcome would end the characterisation of accountants as ‘bean-counters’, and how it is the strategic insight of accountants that will save them.  Both of these things are probably true; yet it will not save accountants in the numbers that are currently employed.  And that 95% risk looks threateningly high to me – either we will not need accountants in such numbers in future, or something is very wrong in the data somewhere.  I’m not sure which is true, but the response within the profession seems remarkably cool.

References

BBC News, Will A Robot Take Your Job? 11 September 2015 (webpage available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-34066941)

Becani, C., Future of Work: Death of the Accountant and Auditor, 8 May 2014 (webpage available at: https://www.cfoinnovation.com/accounting-compliance/future-work-death-accountant-and-auditor)

Frey, C. B., and Osborne, M. A., The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation? 2013 (academic paper available at https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf)

Haldane, A., Labour’s Share, 2015 (speech to the Trades Union Congress, available at: https://www.bis.org/review/r151203a.pdf

Nagarajah, E., Hi, Robot.  What Does Automation Mean For The Accounting Profession? Accountants Today, July/August 2016 (webpage available at: https://www.pwc.com/my/en/assets/press/1608-accountants-today-automation-impact-on-accounting-profession.pdf)

O*NET Online, a database of US occupation characteristics (webpage available at: https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/13-2011.01)

Peston, R., WTF? Hodder & Stoughton, 1997 (paperback, 1998)

Pettigrew, J., Why CAs Will Never Be Replaced By Robots, 16 November 2015 (webpage available at: https://www.icas.com/ca-today-news/presidents-column-why-cas-will-never-be-replaced-by-robots)

BRUT: Europe, or why architecture is not what it seems

Part of the Glasgow International Festival of 2018, this one-day event was a series of talks and discussions around architecture and the urban environment. The approach was to explore themes related to modernist architecture – or more particularly, stuff made out of concrete in Europe after the 2^ndWorld War.

The event kicked off with a talk by Owen Hatherley about the interplay between modernist housing in the UK and in the former Soviet Union, exploring the idea that somehow concrete housing projects are ‘Soviet’ either in design quality, or social engineering.  In fact, it seems more complicated than this, with the interplay between the two more reminiscent of a jazz duet.  The twentieth century witnessed developments at different points in eastern and western Europe, sometimes with a nod to each other, at other times not.

What tends to get lost in the political interpretation of architecture is that for the residents, this very often meant a substantial improvement in the quality of their housing.  Nor were there many dissenting voices around the cultural offerings incorporated into these schemes, even if a middle class liberal conscience might inwardly scream at the assumption that working-class families only really needed a pub, a bookies, and a bingo hall to keep them occupied.

The relationship of people to their built environment was explored in the context of the suburb of Silainiai, in the city of Kaunas, European Capital of Culture for 2022.  Here, resident artists had begun to explore how art could encourage residents to interact with their local environment (which it turns out was more interesting than first appeared), and thereby with each other, helping to create the kind of neighbourliness and community that everyone seems to want, but no-one is quite sure how to build or measure.  That experience was made all the more important because the one building from the original plan that was never built in Silainiai, was the cultural centre itself.

The achievements in Kaunas are interesting because they have been attained despite the apparent monolithic and repetitive nature of the housing.  Yet one of the artists in residence found that concrete was much more interesting than she first thought, and had a subtlety to it that is easy to miss.  Thus the narrative is not one of humanising a brutal environment, but of challenging perceptions of that brutality.  Concrete, it seems, is worth a second look.  As any fan of Grand Designs will tell you, concrete is often a key part of a building project, and can create fascinating textures to walls that make them far from brutal.

That beauty is also evident in Italy, where there is a form of architecture known as ‘Incompiuto Siciliano’, a tongue-in-cheek description of unfinished civic works (irrigation schemes, roads, stadia) where the point of them was as much to support local cement manufacture as to actually complete a finished structure.  Indeed, it was open to question whether even the architects thought their works would actually be finished.  And if so, this raises the question of what they are.  For the Italian artists behind the label, the thought process is simple: if architecture is a mix of form and function, and these structures have no function, then they must be pure form, or art.  Therefore the question is what to do with monumental concrete artistic expressions.  There is something extraordinary about these follies – concrete again proving itself beautiful, even when half finished.  The incomplete stand for a never-finished stadium, or the (literal) road to nowhere, take on a strange quality when left in that state.

Of course, you don’t need to go to Italy to see versions of this, and there are plenty of cities with unfinished concrete structures in them dating back decades.  The oddity with unfinished structures is their resemblance to follies (never intended for completion) or ruins (which follies are trying to imitate).  They are an unusual space, and the same can be said for buildings like St Peter’s Cardross, a ruined modernist training school for priests.  Edward Hollis argued that the importance of St Peter’s in its current state is not so much a question of what you can do with the building (destroy, re-complete, adapt, manage as a ruin), as the creative space it offers the imagination. The building itself may continue to crumble and decay, but as long as it is there, it offers inspiration for the creative.

In a similar way, remnants of the Berlin Wall, a hateful use of concrete if ever there was one, now turn up in the oddest places and have the oddest uses: the backdrop to a wedding seemed the strangest of the lot.  Yet perhaps strangeness is in its blood: the original use was startlingly strange, dividing a city representing the opposite of everything that cities themselves celebrate.  What perhaps is odd is that is that it takes that new strangeness – Berlin Wall as wedding ceremony accessory – to remind you that it had always been strange.  It has not just become so because we see it in places we do not expect.  But it is also that startling use of concrete that becomes a creative outlet itself.

Concrete as a work of beauty, as a basis for creative and artistic expression, seems a long way from the brutalist impression it is famed for. Yet as Hatherley explained, this is more a result of a determination to frame concrete, brutalist architecture, and in particular high-rise living, in a political narrative that reflects neither its potential (as shown by private refurbishments of ex-local authority high rise buildings) nor the significant improvement in living standards it offered.

If places like the Reidvale flats in Dennistoun became a haven for any amount of illegal activities, so would many places if they were never actively policed; likewise, anywhere that is not maintained and upgraded becomes irrelevant; and any place that becomes the dumping ground for those with no stake in society becomes the horror show that you would have imagined.  But it is an unsettling narrative that blames concrete (as a substance) or high-rise housing (as a structure) for this, particularly when it exists alongside seismic changes in employment patterns in post-industrial cities.  But given this narrative, the final use of the Red Road Flats in Glasgow as housing for asylum seekers, when already condemned as unsuitable for Glasgow citizens, should make everyone feel extremely uncomfortable.

It is striking that concrete apartment blocks remain a large part of the housing stock in some ex-Soviet countries.  The reason is entirely pragmatic – you just can’t knock down that volume of housing all at once, and you would have to question why housing that is still sound would be reduced to rubble.  Yet in western Europe, it seems we are both rich enough to make the choice and also stupid enough not to have a sensible conversation about what this architecture has delivered for people.

The saddest part of the story came back to the debacle in Glasgow in 2014, when it was announced that the destruction of the Red Road Flats in Glasgow would form part of the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games.  This was to showcase Glasgow’s regeneration, as a whole approach to housing was swept away.  As Chris Leslie observed, whilst you can understand that viewpoint, it is hard to see why the organisers of the Commonwealth Games could not understand that others did not share it.  The linking of concrete, and high-rise housing, to the ‘bad old days’, the failure of socialist urban planning, is a peculiar obsession of political classes. In reality, people just want somewhere decent to live.  It was their outrage at their former homes being turned into a political message that won the day.  The Red Road Flats are now gone, but not as part of some ghoulish celebration.

What was most striking about the whole day was that constant interplay between the apparent brutalism of concrete (the image), the way in which it nonetheless improved lives (by providing better housing), and the ways in which concrete can be beautiful, even in the unlikeliest of circumstances. What also emerged too was that concrete is just a means to an end, a way of making things that could otherwise not be made that quickly, or that cost-effectively, or that creatively.  The structures and environments it helped to create can in turn become creative places.  There is beauty in the unlikeliest of places.

BRUT Europe, featuring talks by Owen Hatherley, Pablo Arboleda, Hussein Mitha, Edward Hollis, Evelina Simkute, Egidijus Bagdonas, and Chris Leslie, was organised by Marija Nemcenko, The Lithuanian Cultural Institute and the European Commission in the UK, and held at The Art School, Glasgow on Monday 7^thMay 2018.

Policy presentation - smoke alarms in Scotland

This story caught my attention this morning, for a number of reasons.

The Scottish Government (SG) has been consulting on fire safety measures as a result of the Grenfell Tower tragedy in 2017.  At present, as the consultation makes clear, there are different standards for different types of property, with the sector least amenable to influence - owner-occupier housing - having no minimum requirements (unless it is new build, where some do exist).

The consultation closed on 1 December, and this morning the SG issued a press release with its official response to that consultation.  The main feature of the story is the requirement that all housing, including owner-occupied, should have an interlinked set of smoke alarms in at least two areas and a heat alarm in the kitchen, as well as a carbon monoxide detector.

It is hard (but not impossible) to argue against the requirement.  Once implemented, it should result in fewer deaths from fires in the home.  There is especial relevance for some of the larger cities in Scotland that feature a high percentage of tenement housing, where there is a kind of collective responsibility to ensure that residents do nothing that would harm their neighbours.  So from a policy perspective, it would seem to make sense.

But it is more complex when it comes to implementation, and the press release has nothing to say in this regard.  This makes the timing of the press release slightly odd: presumably the SG is not over-run with press officers on a Sunday to handle enquiries, but that is the day the SG picks to issue a press release with significant consequences for owner-occupiers, but no details on implementation.

Fortunately, the SG need not have worried: the news outlets I have seen have simply carried the press release with no comment.  However, it struck me that there are some important issues here that deserve to be raised in reporting this story.  First is the question of how much this will cost; second is when it will be required by; and third is how it will be enforced.

The press release does not refer to costs or timescales, although both are referred to in the original consultation.  On costs, the consultation estimates around £80 for a battery operated system, and £120 for purchase and installation of a mains-wired system.  On timescales, the SG is suggesting 1 year if the final decision is in favour or battery operated systems, or 2 years if the recommendation is for mains-wired systems.

Although the press release is mystifyingly silent on the issue, the original consultation document also contains a range of options for ensuring compliance.  These include reporting neighbours to the local authority in cases of apparent non-compliance, and giving purchasers of tenement flats the right to see proof that other properties have complied with the legislation.  Other measures mooted include using the annual gas safety check, or the Home Safety Report, as mechanisms to encourage compliance.

The consultation document concludes that more than one measure is likely to be required, which is probably policy-speak for saying that none of the measures on their own has the right characteristics of being palatable and effective.

The SG is now committed to the policy objective, but since the press release contains nothing on implementation, we can only assume that the SG will go with its original plans in the consultation.  On that basis, at least 600,000 private homes in Scotland will require a new smoke alarm installation within the next 12-24 months.  The press release specifically sets out that each home needs a heat alarm in the kitchen, a smoke alarm in each circulation space on each floor, at least one in the room most used in the house, all interlinked, and affixed to the ceiling.  In addition, each home must have a carbon monoxide detector.

The costs of this - picking Amazon.co.uk as a basis for a reasonable amount - are seemingly more expensive now than when the consultation was written, at around £120 for a complete interlinked battery operated system (2 smoke alarms, a heat alarm, and a carbon monoxide detector).  It would seem reasonable to assume that those costs will only increase over the next few years as demand increases to reflect the implementation timetable.

The consultation assumes that homeowners should simply pay for this.  It is not in itself a huge cost, but for many households it will be an unwelcome additional expense.  Although there is an impact assessment accompanying the consultation, this is in respect of equalities groups, of which those with little spare cash is not one, so there is no consideration of the impact on poorer households.  This approach of 'owner pays' is in contrast to previous measures such as the phasing out of old light bulbs, which was accompanied by a mass giveaway of replacement long-life lightbulbs rather than a requirement that everyone simply pay more to replace their bulbs.  And arguably this measure is more important.

But from a policy making perspective, it is the enforcement of the measures that seems so unusual in all this.  The consultation acknowledges that asking gas and electrical engineers to enforce implementation in their visits to properties is not an option.  It also notes that using the Home Report to highlight the need for works at the point of property sale would be sub-optimal given that 30% of properties have been in the same owner-occupation for over 20 years.

The consultation suggests that, for tenements, a new owner-occupier could ask to see evidence that other properties had suitable measures for fire safety.  But the consultation notes that it would be hard to be sure what might constitute suitable evidence.  Equally complex would be how this mechanism would work: would new tenement owners have to ask to see evidence; or would solicitors working on the sale incorporate it into their work (and increase their fees to cover this, presumably)?  If so, how would they do this?  And what would happen if no evidence was produced?  Would that be enough to withdraw from the agreement to purchase the property?

But nor does pushing all the implementation onto local authorities seem a sensible option.  There are several areas where a local authority would experience cost pressures:

• The costs of handling the anonymous reports that are expected to come from concerned neighbours about the state of properties nearby.
• The costs of taking action short of enforcement, surely a likely first step by local authorities to encourage homeowners to address fire safety measures.
• The costs of carrying out work on properties by enforcement action.  As the consultation notes, even if an authority could recover costs from households where it had carried out work on their behalf, it would still need the money upfront to pay for all this.  And that is before you consider the costs from owner-occupiers challenging the quality or cost of enforcement work. 

So, what can we conclude about this initiative?  The policy itself has a good deal to commend it, especially for tenements and houses in multiple occupation.  What is odd is the unpalatable nature of the options for implementation, coupled with the absence of any alternative to what you might call the 'big stick' approach to delivering a policy outcome.  There is little in the press release, or indeed the consultation itself, that discusses how you might incentivise homeowners to improve fire safety measures.  And surely that would be worth considering, given the apparent difficulty of forcing homeowners to act.  When it comes to implementing the policy objective here, the devil is well and truly in the detail, which makes it all the more curious that the SG issues a press release with no acknowledgement of this, at one minute past midnight on a Sunday.


News story as carried on the BBC (other outlets had a near identical story)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-43443725

Original press release released at 00:01 on Sunday 18 March
https://news.gov.scot/news/improving-home-safety

Original consultation on fire safety
http://www.gov.scot/Resource/0052/00524309.pdf

The neutrality of civil servants and the civil service

In Episode 5 of Season 5 of The West Wing, Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman realises that a recent laudatory newspaper article was written using quotes from ex-girlfriend Amy Gardner as a birthday present to him.  Josh is not pleased, and argues with Amy as follows:

JOSH     I'm talking about a code, an ethos you don't understand.

AMY       Josh, I was just...

JOSH     The Post profile, the "legislative juggernaut," all those anecdotes, all those quotes

                came from you.

AMY       Happy birthday. 

JOSH     We don't glorify ourselves.  We don't advertise. It's not the code.

AMY       It's not the code to look strong to your constituents?

JOSH     The only constituency that matters in this building is the constituency of one - the guy in the round room [Oval Office], and that's who you and I work for. 

AMY       I came here to work on issues, not to be part of a messianic cult. 

JOSH     You serve the issue by serving the man.

(Taken from http://westwingwiki.com/2014/04/season-5-episode-5-constituency-one/)

Of course, Josh Lyman’s character is a political appointee, serving at the request of a democratically elected president.  His loyalty is therefore intensely (and personally) political.  It is a theme that The West Wing returns to on several occasions: the main characters serve at the pleasure of the president.

But the same issue – the role of advisors and politicians - has resurfaced in a UK context with the recent public profiles of civil servant Olly Robbins, seen as trying to minimise the impact of Brexit, and the criticisms of HM Treasury staff over gloomy economic predictions under various Brexit scenarios (see links below).

Civil servants (with the exception of special advisors) are not political appointees, and serve the government regardless of its political make up.  As Sir Jeremy Heywood, head of the civil service, stated after Lord Lawson’s accusation that the civil service might attempt to frustrate Brexit:

The civil service has always prided itself on supporting the elected government of the day in carrying out its mandate. 

But in some ways this neutrality has amplified the criticism of civil servants.  It is precisely because they are not political that they are open to criticism that they are, in fact, acting politically.  This seems to be the substance of the criticism of HM Treasury’s forecasts.

Lord Lawson himself was actually making a slightly different point.  He argued that Brexit represents a radical change, and that civil servants do not like radical change.  He qualified this by saying that although civil servants might try to frustrate Brexit, ultimately they would see the policy through.

In other words, Lawson’s point was about the civil service as an institution that does not like change.  This is not an unfamiliar criticism of institutions: that they are slow to change, and face difficulties when faced with changing to radically different paths from the established one.  Indeed, reforming the civil service itself has been likened to changing the direction of an oil tanker, whereby you make an adjustment and it’s only some time later that you notice the ship changing direction.

So if we separate out the issue of political persuasion of civil servants, and look at the way the civil service might work as an institution, some interesting questions start to form:

·     Does the civil service have an institutional view of policy issues?  If so, is it consistent across departments (e.g. always intervene, never intervene), or over time (has the civil service become more or less ambitious in its role?)

·       How might that affect its neutrality in advising on, and then implementing, policy?

·      How in practice does the civil service carry out a policy it does not believe is supported by the evidence at hand?  Is there any institutional reluctance to pursue a particular policy, or to shape it to minimise the impact (the Brexit issue)?

That there is an ‘institutional’ view is clear from issues like whistle-blowing, where civil servants have publicly revealed what they believe to be problems in the neutrality of policy process and implementation.  Such problems are often a clash between the perspective of the civil service itself, and the policies of those they are elected to serve, and were the subject of a Public Accounts Committee report in July 2014.  A more startling example was reported in the Guardian in September 2014, where a whistle-blower alleged that a policy was presented as excessively risky because civil servants did not like it.

Some of the examples referred to above might indicate a risk that civil servants try to influence a policy, or dilute it, to serve the ends of the institution.  But there is equally a risk in the other direction: that civil servants see the promotion of political aims as a means of career progression.  In other words, where civil servants should be cautious, they are in fact the opposite, and could see being at the forefront of a particular change or reform as a way of developing a career.

This risk is more likely in scenarios where radical change is planned – indeed, radical change could produce both reactions described here, both institutional caution and career-inspired enthusiasm.  The civil service likes an evidence base as much as anyone, so the issue here is not about the dogmatic promotion of a policy (the lack of evidence would see to that), but more of how might evidence be presented and interpreted to support a particular viewpoint.  So our questions of civil service neutrality reflect this issue:

·      How does the civil service recognise, and prevent, the over-enthusiastic promotion of a policy where that is driven by a personal, career, agenda?

·      How might the personal, or political, viewpoints of individual civil servants be managed within the promotion of policy?

·      How can the success in meeting a ministerial agenda be judged in terms of the appraisal of an individual’s performance?  Is it a good thing, or not?

On a broader scale, we might also want to look at the career aspirations of whole departments.  Just as individuals might wish to promote a view that suits them, so a whole department might wish to promote a particular position as it strengthens their institutional position within the civil service as a whole.  For example, a broad policy position that was positive about the impact of an interventionist government might increase the power of public spending departments, and decrease that of tax-raising ones.  Conversely, a view that the state should be as small as possible would shift power in the opposite way.  So, how does the civil service also manage the institutional ambitions of departments when it comes to policy advocacy?

All of this is a way of saying that ‘neutrality’ is a complicated thing to define, and may not really exist.  The views and aspirations of individuals, combined with the views and aspirations of institutions, probably see to that.  So maybe neutrality is not what the civil service should be offering.  And if it isn’t, that will change the way in which politicians should view their advice.  That is not arguing for a fundamentally different way of running government; but perhaps a more honest and open one.

Disclosure

I am a former civil servant, having worked in HM Treasury from 2001-04.  I was also a colleague of David Owen, referred to in The Guardian article below.

Sources:

Lord Lawson: Civil servants want to ‘frustrate Brexit’, BBC News, 22 January 2018

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42782637

Is Olly Robbins the ‘real’ Brexit secretary?  BBC News, 23 January 2018

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-42777986

Brexit minister Steve Baker in civil service row apology, BBC News, 2 February 2018

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-42911538

Jacob Rees-Mogg says Treasury ‘fiddling figures’ on Brexit, BBC News, 3 February 2018

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-42929071

Whistleblowing: Ninth Report of Session 2014-15, House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts:

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201415/cmselect/cmpubacc/593/593.pdf

Treasury ordered to pay £142,000 to ‘whistleblower’ former civil servant, 28 September 2014:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/28/treasury-ordered-pay-whistleblower-civil-servant-david-owen