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Public Accounts

When anyone comes to see us, we naturally think that they will have a vested interest. I am reminded of the diaries of the hon. Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin), which were published yesterday and in which he said that one of his first steps was to see no vested interests of any kind when he became a junior Minister. That did not last. Richard Branson wrote to the Prime Minister and was passed on to the Foreign Secretary, and when the issue was finally passed to the hon. Member for Sunderland, South, he felt unable to say no to meeting Mr. Branson. Of course, the hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh) is right. All companies have their own commercial interests, and it is quite right that they do their best to protect them. He mentioned Building Schools for the Future, which raises another issue about consultancy, on which I will finish. We had that hearing only a few months ago, so the issue is not yet before us in a Treasury minute. The average salary of the employees of Building Schools for the Future is £85,000, which is pretty high. It has 111 employees. Hon. Members might think that the reason why they have high salaries—indeed, this is the reason given—is that they are all specialists and therefore such salaries are needed to attract them. The permanent secretary said that there is a market in such things. Perhaps he is right—one assumes that he is—but people might assume that, if there were a lot of in-house expertise, consultants would not be used so much. Yet since that body has been established, it has spent nearly £6 million on consultancy. In the past year alone, it has spent £750,000 on consultants and, when asked about that, those involved said, "Oh, that's mostly for lawyers." Why are the schemes so complex that people cannot bid for them without enormously thick contracts? The average cost of bidding for a Building Schools for the Future contract is about £1 million, which, admittedly, is a lot less than the cost of bidding for a PFI hospital, at £11 million, but that goes back to the point about oligopoly—people are possibly being shut out, and the Government, on behalf of taxpayers, must always be aware of that.