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Public Accounts

Thank you very much, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I am grateful to have caught your eye. Like the hon. Member for Portsmouth, North (Sarah McCarthy-Fry), I am thrilled to be a member of the Public Accounts Committee. It is the best possible training to see not only how parliamentary Committees work, but how Whitehall works, and I am grateful to have that opportunity. Like previous speakers, I pay tribute to the work of the Committee secretariat, to the National Audit Office and to the chairmanship of my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh). Like the hon. Member for Portsmouth, North, I found that attending my first Sitting of the PAC rather took my breath away, with the ferocity of the questioning, but we have got into our stride and started to give as good as we get. It is important that we question witnesses robustly. One of the things that I have noticed during the hearings that we have had so far is that increasingly, there are organisations that are neither directly accountable to the electorate nor subject to the rigours of the marketplace, so it falls to us as the Public Accounts Committee to be almost the only possible scrutineers of their performance. That is not a happy situation. A class of organisations is developing that are neither part of the accountable public sector, nor subject to market disciplines. They are part of a kind of para-state that it is particularly difficult to interrogate. I refer to three examples. The first example causes me frustration because it was the subject of one of our hearings and has been covered in the reports before us: Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. In a hearing on the complexity of benefits and tax credits, we considered a recent change in policy—the increase in the earnings disregard for tax credits from £2,500 to £25,000. Clearly, such a step change has a cost attached to it, and it strikes me that part of our core remit in assessing the value for money of Government policy is to find out what those costs are. The transcript of the evidence reads like an episode of ““Yes, Minister””. It took about 19 questions to solicit from the officials responsible whether any estimate had been made of the cost of the change. It turned out that there was an estimate. Of course there was; any increase in a disregard from £2,500 to £25,000 is clearly a major policy decision and Revenue and Customs had assessed it. An undertaking was given that not necessarily a robust estimate but the one that was made in assessing the policy would be disclosed to the Committee. I waited for that disclosure to be made, and I waited and I waited, and I continue to wait. I tried the route of parliamentary questions. I tabled a question before Christmas for answer on 20 December, but no answer came from the Treasury. There was neither a Christmas card nor any form of greeting from the Chancellor. I asked for the estimate that had been made when the policy was being assessed, but the answer that was finally given on 10 January was entirely unsatisfactory and diversionary:"““Precise estimates of the change in entitlement resulting from the higher disregard . . . will not be known until 2006–07 awards have been finalised in early 2008.””—[Official Report, 10 January 2006; Vol. 441, c. 556W.]" The PAC gives us our one and only opportunity to ask questions of officials who are not directly accountable in any other forum, so it is particularly important. It is therefore disappointing that such an important Committee does not have quite the set of teeth that we need. Parliament’s role of scrutinising the Government is very important and should be treated with respect. To exclude from scrutiny by the Committee and therefore the House such a major area of Government spending is not in accordance with the principles on which the PAC was established all those years ago. The second area is the national health service. In this arena of para-state organisations, where accountability is difficult to exercise, we have different parts of the NHS going by different names. We have primary care trusts, strategic health authorities and trusts, but they are all part of the NHS. We should have one NHS and that should be accountable. Indeed, it is important to getting value for money that it is accountable. By way of illustration, in my constituency operations and out-patient appointments are no longer being allocated or offered to those who need them, but the identity of who can be held responsible for that is obscure.