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Public Accounts

No, that is not my view. Most of the urgent operational requirement contracts have arisen because the armed forces are in new environments and they discover that they have urgent operational requirements for particular pieces of equipment. They did not envisage having an urgent operational requirement for a piece of equipment until they found that they needed it, otherwise it would have been in the system already. I know from provision made from plants in my constituency that the forces have been genuinely astonished about what they found they needed, as they thought they had equipment that was entirely satisfactory. As I am sure we are all aware, the stuff that is necessary for fighting on the north German plain is not necessarily the same stuff that is needed for fighting in the mountains of Afghanistan; even some of the materiel that was necessary for Iraq is not adequate for Afghanistan. Therefore, it is changes of environment that produce urgent operational requirements; I would have thought that was blindingly obvious. Let me return to the point about the hon. Gentleman being a zealot and joining the PAC as a member of the Tory Taliban. There is an issue to do with the extent to which Members sit on the Committee to paddle their own canoes and pursue their own private obsessions—the extent to which they are there to judge whether a Government decision was right in the first place—and the extent to which they are there to judge whether that decision, having been made, has been implemented correctly. It seems to me that the hon. Gentleman has got himself on the wrong side of that balance. It is not our job as PAC members to decide whether these contracts should have been thrown open to competition across the world; it is our job to decide, the Government having made such decisions, whether a contract has been implemented as speedily, accurately and well as it should have been. I look forward to the PAC Chairman ruling the hon. Gentleman out of order on a number of occasions in future, since the Chairman's predecessor did that often enough to me—in another direction, politically speaking. I also want to raise the issue of culture—not the kind of culture that makes me reach for my revolver, but the culture of the Departments. That was most clearly expounded when we were discussing the management of expenditure in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It was revealed that the culture in some sections of the Department was always to assume that they would underspend, and that therefore they could over-order on the basis that there would then be a rough balancing-out. That is very much a case of amateur night, and is entirely indefensible. Should not the Treasury have been pursuing that, as I presume that it is the Department that supervises such matters—when it is not covering up whether or not it knows whom it employs and what their educational qualifications and social backgrounds are? Perhaps the PAC ought to return to such questions of culture in a more systematic way. I very much welcome the fact that the Chairman has been taking us down the road of undertaking thematic explorations, in particular in relation to project management. Once we have made more progress on that, we ought to pursue the issue of changing culture. I shall now turn to the report, "Meeting needs? The Offenders' Learning and Skills Service". It was revealed that in some policy areas there is a lack of provision and of delivery of service. We ought to have some system of passing that on to the appropriate committee. It is not our job to pursue the extent to which there continues to be a low level of literacy and numeracy among prisoners, or the extent to which the Prison Service's need to move people around the estate means that their opportunities to learn are constantly disrupted. It is perhaps our job to identify that difficulty, but I am not quite clear what the mechanism then is for the concerns that we identify and express to be passed on to someone else, and for us to be sure that they are picking them up. Select Committees focus on major issues, and relatively small issues such as that might be swept up in an overall look at the Prison Service, for example, or at adult literacy. The question of the balance between moving prisoners around the system and the education and training opportunities that we offer them does not then get picked up on. I wonder whether the Chairman of the Committee could reflect on that and provide some possible solutions for the future. Finally, I want to remind the House about our examination of the Revenue and Customs Prosecutions Office. We heard the long litany of what I regarded as exploitation of the system by barristers, who were clearly bleeding the system white. That reminds us that being involved with the private sector is not always a route toward enhanced efficiency. Some elements of the private sector are in many ways far more inefficient and self-serving, and far less controllable or demonstrably operating in the public interest than sections of the public sector. There is the assumption that says, "Private good, public bad". Anyone who looks at the way that barristers operate—simply gouging the public sector—cannot doubt for a moment that there is a very strong argument for such sections to be examined more fully by us.