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Public Accounts

I am most grateful to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I was talking about the report on the Rural Payments Agency, but I shall now proceed to talk about the reports on PFI contracts and Government consultancy contracts that are within our purview today. The report on consultants, in particular, shows a much more critical attitude to civil servants on the part of Government than I would want. We have a fine civil service in this country, but it has been downgraded—first by the Conservative Government, whose leaders had a path in their heads and imposed things on the civil service, and then by us, who did not quite trust civil servants. The result has been that instead of taking policy advice from civil servants, the Government prefer to have the imprimatur of outside consultants, at enormous expense. What the second report—there was an earlier one in 2002—shows is the enormous fees paid to consultancies, and as we all know, consultancies are a system for telling us what we wanted to hear in the first place.