TEARDOWN | 13 September 2026 at 06:44 | ★★★☆☆3 out of 5 stars 3/5

Solvent, and still a disaster

The Sourcing Playbook is the Cabinet Office's rulebook for buying outside help, built chapter by chapter around the risk of a supplier going bust. Capita, one of the firms that helped shape it, took over the government's own Civil Service Pension Scheme in December 2025 without going anywhere near insolvency. Twenty million records went missing in the handover, sixteen of twenty-one headline targets were still failing seven months later, and the government has withheld 9.9 million pounds. We tested the document's own promises against the National Audit Office's account and two parliamentary hearings.

Read full article

TEARDOWN | 12 September 2026 at 18:43 | ★★★★☆4 out of 5 stars 4/5

The insolvency chapter, tested

The Construction Playbook told every central government department that resolution planning would keep public building work running if a supplier collapsed. In September 2024, ISG, the Ministry of Justice's main prison contractor, went into administration anyway. The National Audit Office found the same prison programme already 4.2 billion pounds over budget, in part because a flagship modular scheme's own costs were never properly scoped, the exact failure the Playbook's Should Cost Models exist to catch.

Read full article

TEARDOWN | 12 September 2026 at 18:27 | ★★★★☆4 out of 5 stars 4/5

The performance data almost nobody publishes

The Service Standard tells every central government team to publish performance data so the public can check whether a service works. The tool built for that job, the Performance Platform, closed in March 2021. Five years on, its named replacement on data.gov.uk carries 23 datasets in total, several untouched for years, one of them for a service that itself shut down in 2023.

Read full article

TEARDOWN | 12 September 2026 at 18:11 | ★★★☆☆3 out of 5 stars 3/5

The rulebook with a dead address

The Consultancy Playbook still tells civil servants to contact the Government Consulting Hub for triage, training and a knowledge-sharing platform. The hub closed in January 2023. The document has not been updated since September 2022, and the National Audit Office has now said so in public.

Read full article

TEARDOWN | 12 September 2026 at 17:48 | ★★★☆☆3 out of 5 stars 3/5

The audit that grades itself

Retitled and expanded in December 2025 to cover artificial intelligence, the government's ethics framework asks every public sector AI team to name an owner, log every decision and complete a self-assessment. Nobody outside the team ever marks it, and the transparency standard it leans on for accountability has 152 published records to show for three years of mandatory use.

Read full article

TEARDOWN | 12 September 2026 at 11:51 | ★★★☆☆3 out of 5 stars 3/5

Nine pages, eight mistakes

The government's voluntary Software Security Code of Practice defines "shall" as a requirement, cites EU law through a commercial training website, and cannot number its own principles consistently. It also gets a lot right. We counted, both ways.

Read full article

TEARDOWN | 11 September 2026 at 22:45 | ★★☆☆☆2 out of 5 stars 2/5

Nobody checked the AI Playbook

The 118-page guide that tells every civil servant to verify AI output misnames its own department three times, mislabels a famous security incident, and overstates the data protection law most likely to govern its readers' projects. We read it line by line.

Read full article

CORRECTION | 11 September 2026 at 22:45

The Corrections Log

Every substantive error published on this site is recorded here permanently: what was wrong, when it was fixed, and how it got through. A site that marks other people's documents publicly has to keep its own errors in public view too.

Read full article