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Public Accounts

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. With regard to specific issues, what she says is true, but one of the most noticeable things is that there are recurrent themes in the reports. I want to refer to some of those, which the Committee has to look at repeatedly. That suggests that some work is intrinsically difficult for Government to do and we need to concentrate on improving Government’s capability to do those things. First, Members have talked about the big IT programmes. The 25th report on congestion and the 27th report on IT projects dealt with those. The continuing and probably necessary reliance of all Governments, whatever their complexion, on large IT projects is a triumph of hope over experience. Secondly, another recurrent problem is the tendency for large capital projects to overrun, hence the difficulty in controlling their costs. A third problem, which comes out in the report on tax credits, the benefit system and asylum, is the great difficulty in running systems that of necessity are large and bureaucratic, because they deal with large case loads, and in personalising them to individuals. It is especially difficult to run such systems because, by definition, they are run by the state. They are not areas where choice and competition are possible, or even imaginable. The question is how to improve the efficiency of such systems. Another issue, which arises continually in the papers before us and in evidence from officials is the problematic interface between the public and private sectors, such as the shortages of key skills in the public sector and the question of salary relativities. Again that comes through in lots of areas. That said, there are many virtues in the way in which the Committee works. A key virtue is the specificity of the reports. It means that we avoid the rather generalised management discussion about outcomes, outputs and targets and look at what is happening in a particular case to particular people. I know that officials sometimes feel that we are rather harsh on them and that we use our constituency cases to back up a criticism. I suggest to officials who might read the record of this debate that senior officials get an over-rosy picture of how well systems are operating. When they visit local offices they are shown exactly what is going best, what is new and what is innovative. Somewhere between us lies what is really going on in the public services. There is the issue of the way the Committee works. Is it too confrontational? Does that reduce the quality of the information that we retrieve? Currently it is fashionable to decry Punch and Judy politics and to look for something more consensual. There is also the question of whether the arrival of more female members on the Committee will feminise the working and make it more consensual.