The Government’s own public projects watchdog, announced in 2010, appears to lack the resources to keep track of its workload.

Jarion Richardson, the Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office and Digital Innovation, also said that reforms across the Government lacked a reliable yardstick for measuring progress.

Mr Richardson said of the Office of Procurement and Project Management: “The criticism is not of its members. They’re doing their jobs.

“The problem is I don’t believe they have sufficient resources to manage projects across the Government. We should have project management professionals specifically overseeing reforms.”

Mr Richardson thanked his government counterpart, Diallo Rabain, for affording close to three hours out of the four-hour debate for the Opposition to ask questions.

“The devil is in the details when it comes to the Cabinet Office, which is the Government’s headquarters and brains trust,” he said.

“For the Office of Procurement and Project Management, as I said in the Budget debate, it’s not about intentions; it’s about outcomes.”

He said the office lacked “a central register of projects across ministries, and that means that only certain projects are currently being overseen by OPMP”.

“I’m not saying every project has to be managed. There are different methods — some projects will not have enough risk or other criteria that require a professional project manager. But not only does no central register exist, there are no criteria to say what would go on it.

“The fact is that we’re not seeing the level of seriousness required across all ministries to ensure that Cabinet and the head of the public service are informed to make executive decisions.”

Mr Richardson added: “What we lack right now is a defined mechanism in the Cabinet Office and OPMP to monitor and measure reforms, while the volume and complexity of government projects means our oversight mechanisms are falling behind the pace of change.

“In the Department of Information and Digital Technology, we’re seeing significant investment in IT — as we should, given the cybersecurity attack. The problem is that the parliamentary process for the cyberattack is not included.

“We’re not seeing the amount of information that we need, and that information doesn’t have to come from just the parliamentary scrutiny process. It could just be given by the Government, but we have to rummage around to find these things out.”

He added: “There are plenty of ways we could get information on cybersecurity. Parliamentary process is one way to reliably get it, but there’s no reason the Government can’t share that information.”

Mr Richardson said he wished to see better tracking and measurement for programmes such as the public service strategic plan, artificial intelligence deployment and the digital transformation unit.

He highlighted the digital tool SAFEbuilt, provided last month to the planning department to aid the processing of building permit applications.

“SAFEbuilt sounds really good,” Mr Richardson said. “But as the Opposition we’re not here to make Government feel good about ideas. We’re here to make sure the Government can accomplish them.”