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Public Accounts

And for recommending their friends to carry through the execution of the project. That is the procedure. Our report showed that the Government were making excessive use of consultants and pointed to the need to build up expertise in the Departments rather than handing work out to consultants. It is a question of respect for the civil service. I said that I would be brief, but all the interruptions have made me take a detour for what seems like the past three quarters of an hour. I shall conclude with a couple of observations about the way in which we deal with the reports. Perhaps it is the geriatric in me, but I find our procedures a bit confusing. A National Audit Office report comes out, and we have a session on it. We then write a report, and when it is finally published, we get telephone calls from people asking us about something that we have totally forgotten about. The procedure is not seamless; it is not well knit together. There is not a stage at which we can really produce a conclusive report on an issue. The second problem is that, as I said at the beginning, in all our proceedings we are not actually dealing with the people who made the mistake—the people who took the decision. If we are to produce an effective report, we need to know what happened to them. We need to know whether any sanctions were imposed on them, or whether they took a seamless path to promotion, as my hon. Friend the Member for North-West Leicestershire put it. As Virgil said,"““facilis descensus Averno…sed revocare gradum…hoc opus, hic labor est.””" That is, it would be difficult to pull those people down again. We, as a Committee, need to know what happened to them, and whether any sanctions were imposed on them. However, the Committee should be able to acknowledge that many of the mistakes are ours; they are made by politicians, and result from our not thinking a project through before we ask the civil service to implement it.