asked Her Majesty's Government:

When the new accounts procedures of HM Treasury were established; whether this new system applies to all departments; and to what extent the new procedures have affected individual departmental budgets.[HL7969]

The new accounts procedures—resource accounting—were introduced in 1996-97 and applied to all departments. HM Treasury, in common with other departments, presented its first set of audited resource accounts to Parliament in respect of the financial year 1999-2000; HM Treasury's accounts were laid in March 2001.

Resource budgets for all departments replaced cash budgets from 2001-02, which means that they began to reflect non-cash costs (such as cost of capital, depreciation and other non-cash items such as provisions for liabilities) in addition to cash costs. A back series of resource and near-cash budgets since 2000-01 for departmental groupings is published at Tables 1.5 and 1.7 of the Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses 2006 (CM6811) a copy of which has been placed in the House of Commons Library.