The House of Commons rises on 18 July. But as ministers prepare to slip away to Tuscany or the Dordogne, certain mean schoolmasters are seeking to make mandarins return to school over the summer holidays.
The meanies in question are chancellor George Osborne and chief secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander.
As part of a Treasury desire to instil business discipline into Whitehall's financial management, the review will report to Treasury ministers by the end of the year on how the government could sharpen its game by learning from best corporate experience from around the corporate world.
This roughly translates as ministers, exasperated at how often central government's sheer lack of commercial nous, numeric skills or project know-how, results in cost overruns and a constant stream of public policy disasters, are determined to make senior officials learn how to sniff out disasters before they happen.
Ministers are concerned about the bottomless pit that has been the Ministry of Defence's procurement, or the revised contract for GPs that has stuffed family doctors mouths with gold - without any compensatory reform to hours or service.
Looming instances were highlighted in May by the Major Project Authority's audit of the government's most significant programmes – 191 of them with a total value of £353bn.
Universal Credit, the coalition's flagship welfare project is the biggest concern, at both national and local level. To this end, the surprise departure of government troubleshooter and head of the MPA, David Pitchford – who himself pitched in to oversee UC for three months as an emergency measure – will not necessarily be helpful.
Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude will liaise with the review, which echoes many of his concerns about the lack of relevant professional skills in the upper echelons of a civil service that is being radically refashioned for the era of commissioning.
In essence, Maude wants Whitehall staffed with senior civil servants who understand spreadsheets as fluently as their counterparts in FTSE 1000 companies would be expected to.
For Julian McCrae, deputy director of the Institute for Government think-tank, the ‘driver' of decisions in the corporate world about priorities would be the chief financial officer. The challenge would be how to introduce a similarly rigorous approach into Whitehall.
It's fair to say steps are being taken in this direction already, as the National Audit Office's stdy on financial government found. DCLG permanent secretary and head of the civil service Sir Bob Kerslake, who is a qualified accountant, was cited as a prime example of this shift.
But, as has regularly been the case, it's not the famed ‘direction of travel' as much as the speed of journey which counts – especially in the final half of the Coalition's term.
