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Public Accounts

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Dagenham (Jon Cruddas), who is right to point to the potential effects of failure of public policy in creating division in a community. I am glad he had the opportunity to make that speech. I applaud the work of the Public Accounts Committee, and indeed of the National Audit Office. It does an inestimably important job. I have never had the privilege to serve on the Committee, but before I became a Member of the House I was an audit commissioner, working in a similar area. The co-ordination between the Audit Commission and the National Audit Office is hugely important in itself. One thing that I hope we can establish is that there are no gaps between the two bodies, which are responsible for checking the use of public funds. I also pay tribute to how the Committee works. It clearly works with a degree of unanimity despite, as the hon. Member for Dagenham said, different starting points, although I suspect that those, to an extent, have been coalescing recently, with the possible exception of that of the Chairman, the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), whom I consider a real Conservative. The danger for real Conservatives is that they find themselves ghettoised, like socialists on the other side of the Chamber, and unable to have their position recognised by those on their Front Bench. The Chairman was also right to point out that the publicity attendant on the work of the Committee is hugely important. It gains an awful lot of publicity, for good reason, but that in itself is a spur to better performance. Indeed, the fact that the Committee exists is a spur to better performance. The fact that civil servants and Ministers know that they are accountable to such a body is important: even if they do not have a report written about them, they know that they might have to face a difficult interrogation.