Delegations that nobody can locate

Who was permitted to decide this, on that date.

Providers operate through delegated authority, and the question that arises later is always specific: who was authorised to make this decision at the time it was made. Answering it requires a delegations register with dates, and most providers hold a current version only.

The gap appears when a decision from three years ago is examined. The person who made it may no longer hold the role, the delegation may have been revised twice since, and nothing records what the position was at the relevant moment.

The fix is version retention rather than a better register: keep each superseded version with the period it applied, in the same place. That converts an unanswerable question into a two-minute lookup.

It is also worth checking that the register matches practice. Delegations frequently describe an arrangement that was designed and never operated, with decisions in fact made by somebody else entirely, and that divergence is a finding waiting to be made.

Sub-delegation deserves particular attention, since it is where authority most often leaks. A delegation exercised by an assistant on behalf of the holder is not a delegation, and where that is the practical arrangement it should be authorised explicitly.

It is worth adding that delegations should be tested rather than assumed to operate. Picking three recent decisions and asking who made them, under what authority, is a short exercise that regularly finds decisions made by people with no delegation at all, usually because the authorised person was unavailable and the work had to proceed.