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Public Accounts

In saying that I will be brief, I shall be unusual, and actually be brief. I did not intend to speak in the debate, except of course to ingratiate myself with the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, whose work I so much respect. However, I have some observations. The PAC is the most exciting Committee on which I have ever served. I am rapidly developing my Perry Mason skills, although I am not yet quite brutal enough. At first I was nervous and diffident in the blood sport that is the lust to kill civil servants. I used to quake, but I am learning to be as nasty as the rest, and I hope it will stand me in good stead in parliamentary debates. The experience has been exciting. The Public Administration Committee comes second after the Public Accounts Committee, and it is certainly sexier, but the Public Accounts Committee is the best one to be on. There are a few problems, however. We never get to grips with the people who make the mistakes and fail in their performance; the perpetrators disappear. In business, when someone makes a disastrous mistake they are richly rewarded with a golden handshake and sent into retirement, to start their own company—or some other symptom of failure—but we do not even have a system for sending failures in the public service to run power stations in Cleethorpes, which would be a profitable and interesting occupation. There seem to be no sanctions, and we are not getting to grips with the people who make mistakes. As the Chairman said, it would be useful if we could examine the accounting officer under whose aegis the mistake was made. We cannot do so, which is infuriating. Equally infuriating, many of the mistakes are made by politicians and parties—by us. In this era of 24-hour news coverage, there is a tendency to govern by initiative. We constantly announce new initiatives, approve them in this place, because they are obviously common sense, and rush them in. The Child Support Agency had near unanimous support in the House, as did some of the other developments that have gone so disastrously wrong. Initiatives are rushed in with a chorus of approval and pushed on to Departments by Governments—Governments of both parties, although we are a fairly initiative-prone party. New Labour is more initiative-prone than old Labour and, if the Conservatives ever get back to power, they will probably go in the same direction. As I tried to intimate in my intervention on my Chairman's speech, the problem is that civil servants do not stand up to Ministers and say, ““This can't be done with these resources. We need more staff. We can't do this when the Gershon process is firing and getting rid of the people whose skills we need, whose contacts we have and whose experience we want to mobilise on this project. We can't do it without our existing computer systems.”” I know that there is a problem in the sense that the wool is too easily pulled over the eyes of the civil servants by the salesmen from the super computer companies.