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Public Accounts

I had not noticed that. While I started off by believing that a consensual approach was appropriate, after only a few months I can already see that unless the Committee is tough on people giving evidence, there is vast scope for evasion. As a comfort to witnesses who may have to face the PAC, during the Christmas recess I had a recurring nightmare that I was being grilled by the PAC. I would wake at 3 am to the even more terrifying realisation that I was the one who was meant to be doing the grilling. That of course is related to the question of who takes responsibility for decisions when things go wrong. Colleagues who are long-standing members of the Committee have expressed frustration that it sometimes seems as if in Whitehall no one ever takes final responsibility. A mess is made and people are moved on. Being capable of giving an elegant defence is more important for the careers of officials than the reality of whether they are good at delivering. There is something that we need to address for that reason, and that is the advent of boards and non-executive directors in Whitehall, and their impact on accountability. Traditionally, Ministers are responsible for policy, and accounting officers, the permanent secretary of the Department, for the way the money is spent. A few weeks ago we attended a seminar in the Treasury. It was explained to us that Ministers retained responsibility for, for example, the content of the Budget, but that the boards would share responsibility for the way in which Departments are run. In a policy Department such as the Treasury or Foreign Office, that distinction makes sense, but in other Departments, such as the Department for Work and Pensions or Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, where half the issue is the way in which individual civil servants are treating members of the public, that is not a realistic distinction. We need to look at this area, possibly in conjunction with the Public Administration Committee. Clearly there are overlaps between their responsibilities and ours for examining these structures. Finally, I want to say something about propriety, by which I mean, is public money being spent on the purpose for which it was voted? So few people will be listening to this debate that I shall risk a diplomatic incident by calling this the ““Why we are not Italian”” problem. There is a story—I am not sure whether it is apocryphal—concerning two cities in Italy. Two motorways connect them because different people in the Italian ministry of transport were on the take from different parts of the Mafia. We in this country do not traditionally suffer from such problems, and the 18th report on financial management is clearly relevant in this regard. However, maintaining high standards of propriety is very important to the state of our democracy. We must avoid corruption. Decisions must be transparent and those in public office must be accountable to the people who elect them for the decisions that are finally taken, and not to some other group. Of course, maintaining high standards is also important economically: it promotes efficient markets, rational choices and value for money. I fear that, once lost, the culture of the proper use of public money would be very hard to restore. We only have that culture because of the great work of our predecessors, particularly in the 19th century. We need to renew our focus on this issue. There is a proliferation of complex financing schemes such as private finance initiatives, public-private partnerships and local improvement finance trusts. I am not saying that such schemes are not useful in themselves in leveraging in more capital and new skills, but the risks associated with people moving rapidly between the public and private sectors—between being the customer, and being the person granting the contract—are clear. We would be foolish to close our eyes to this issue, as even the briefest look at the back of ““Private Eye”” every fortnight will tell us. I hope that we can address it in the forthcoming Session.