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Public Accounts

We have found that the Department has been consistently optimistic. We wish it well, of course, but given the sums involved—£12 billion—this is very worrying. I will not list any more examples. Within the terms of the debate, other Members may refer to more of them if they wish to do so. We might get one more chance before the end of this Parliament to have a debate, but we do not know. Therefore, may I just thank a few people? I thank my colleagues in the Chamber, and those who currently serve on the Committee or have done so over the past eight years. They have to dedicate a great deal of time. The Committee meets twice as often as any other Committee and has a huge amount of paperwork. I also thank the Committee staff, particularly our former Committee Clerk, Mark Etherton, who has just left the role. I welcome our new Clerk, Sîan Woodward, who I am sure will be a huge asset to the Committee. I cannot talk about the PAC’s work without acknowledging the National Audit Office. It has a new head, Amyas Morse, whom the Prime Minister and I appointed last year. Mr. Morse is the first qualified chartered accountant to become the Comptroller and Auditor General. He continues to provide the PAC with excellent evidence, on which our work depends. He takes over the NAO’s reins with relish, succeeding Tim Burr, who I also thank. I know that the organisation will go from strength to strength under Mr. Morse’s leadership. I welcome the publication of those parts of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill that will place important changes to the NAO’s governance on a permanent footing. We have modernised the whole organisation and it has a proper board of management, so I hope we can now move forward. Finally, surely it is high time that the benefits of public scrutiny to which I have referred can be applied to other areas. I shall end on this point, because it is perhaps the most important. The NAO is denied regular access to three hugely important and publicly funded bodies: the Bank of England, the BBC and the Financial Services Authority. I welcome the Culture Secretary’s recent statement:""It is time for the BBC to allow the National Audit Office access to its accounts."" I agree with that, although it is not before time. The BBC spends billions of pounds of public money and it should be fully accountable to Parliament—there is no threat to its editorial independence. The CAG should have statutory financial and value-for-money access to examine how the BBC spends public money. That should prevent a recurrence of the difficulties that he met in his study on the BBC’s radio production efficiency when, disgracefully, the BBC tried to limit his remit—that must never happen again. Given the Government’s vital interest—and now investment—in the financial sector, it would also make sense for the CAG to audit the FSA and the Bank of England. The Bank is spending billions of pounds of public money, so it should be properly audited through Parliament and be accountable through Parliament and the Public Accounts Committee. Now is not the time for us to address this—we will start by dealing with the Bank, the FSA and the BBC—but in the next year, in the next Parliament, it will be time to renew the civil list, for which more money will doubtless be asked. That will be a good opportunity for the civil list also to be subject to the scrutiny of the PAC, the NAO and Parliament. That is for a future Parliament to decide. We can make progress now on the BBC, the FSA and the Bank. I hear very encouraging noises from the Treasury on that, so I very much hope that the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury will in her summing up be able to give more encouragement than we have had in the past. Beyond this House, the coming months will prove rocky for many of our constituents; there will be tough decisions for individuals and for the country at large. I urge those from this House who make such decisions to keep in mind the work of the PAC, and to remember—I say this to the Treasury—that we are a friend not a foe. We seek to ask the questions our hard-pressed constituents would ask, and our interest is in striving for better results for the taxpayer. If we make a few witnesses squirm, it is because every pound that our constituents give matters. It is a pound less for their businesses or their families in hard times; their contributions should be spent with respect. That is the common purpose of our Committee, and I commend the motion to the House.