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Public Accounts

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. If people believe that the primary purpose of the British defence budget is to create jobs in Britain, I believe that they do a disservice to our armed forces, whom we ask to make such big sacrifices on our behalf. I believe that in order to reform how the legislature does its job, it would be good if the Public Accounts Committee, and perhaps all Select Committees, had real power: power to censure and power to remove inept civil servants. To stay with the theme of defence procurement, if it had been possible for the PAC to recommend a P45 for the particular officials who oversaw the Chinook fiasco, I do not believe that it would have dragged on for so many years. For all the reports produced on the Chinook affair, I am not aware that a single civil servant has been fired, but I believe that some of them should have been. Other legislatures—grown-up, proper legislatures, ones that are not in the pockets of the Executive—have Committees that do have the power to confirm appointments, the power to oversee budgets and the power to censure failure. I believe that we need to give Committees like the PAC and others the power to veto or ratify departmental budgets. If we did that, we would be able to do something about waste before it happened, not simply pass comment on it retrospectively. Until then, in the spirit of the television shows "Yes Minister" or "The Thick of It", officialdom, Sir Humphrey Appleby and the civil servants will continue to run the show, however ineptly. Ministers will continue to be little more than departmental mouthpieces, occasionally even apologists. The PAC will continue to fume, huff and puff. Unless and until the House has Select Committees with the power to oversee appointments and budgets in Whitehall, we will continue to produce excellent reports, but nothing will fundamentally change.