This Report gives an account of the work of the Treasury Committee and of its Sub-Committee in 2007. The Report identifies four main themes of that work:

• A flexible response to topical issues, so that the Committee could help to set the public agenda and respond to events, a theme reflected particularly in our work on Private equity in the Summer and on Financial stability and transparency since September;
• A strengthened and continuing priority for the scrutiny of the key elements of economic policy, with the Committee's regular work on Budgets, Pre-Budget Reports and inflation reports being supplemented in 2007 with additional Reports on monetary policy and on the Comprehensive Spending Review;
• A continuing commitment to scrutiny of the expenditure and administration of the Chancellor of the Exchequer's departments, including a detailed examination of the impact of the efficiency programme on those departments; and
• A commitment to innovations in practice, demonstrated most significantly by the first pre-appointment hearing under the new nominations process for certain public appointments proposed by the Government in July 2007.

This Report describes the contribution that we have made to increasing public awareness of and engagement with select committees and highlights the value to our work of fact-finding visits.

We analyse the extent to which our work has fulfilled the core tasks of departmental select committees. We describe important aspects of our working practices, including our continued emphasis on follow-up activities. We draw attention to continued room for improvement by the Government in relation to the quality and timing of its responses to our Reports.