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Public Accounts

It would be very difficult for the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), to thank himself, so may I thank him on behalf of all of us? We are deeply appreciative of the work that he has done in the eight years—he will be there a few more months yet—on the Committee. He has raised its profile considerably in the public mind, used the media properly, exposed things that should have had light shone upon them and given good advice—I am surprised that it is only £4 billion that he has saved. His overview, which is contained in his letter—I fortunately received a copy of it—is an excellent summary and the starting point into which any future Committee should look deeply. As the hon. Gentleman says, the Committee is not about just saving money, although that is extremely important; its work often has other, almost better, implications. In this regard, I can think of two of the things that he mentioned in passing, the first of which is secure car parks. Anyone who has had their car broken into or damaged in a car park will use their insurance, but they will encounter the hassle, work, inconvenience and so on that persists from that. It is unquantifiable financially but has a huge effect on people’s lives. If we can save money and avoid that, it must be good for everyone. My second example relates to flooding. I do not know the number of Members whose constituencies contain areas prone to flooding, although the figure is probably more than we realise; the number of such areas has been increasing in recent times. My constituency has suffered major flooding near the coast. Insurance is becoming more difficult to obtain, and the sheer heartache, stress and so on that is visited upon people when they have been flooded is enormous. Again, that is financially unquantifiable, but we must begin to understand that not only is saving money a good thing in its own right, but that doing things better can have even more profound outcomes. I congratulate the hon. Gentleman, his Committee and the National Audit Commission on the work that they have done. They have had some notable successes and I am sure that there will be many to come. I am a member of the Treasury Committee. I suppose that everybody thinks that their own Committee is the most hard-working, the most valuable, the best organised and so on, but when I knew that I was going to be responding in this debate, I looked at the work of the Public Accounts Committee and was astounded at the amount that it has got through—the reports that it has produced and work that it has done. Although members of the Treasury Committee may feel that we do a lot of work, we have to acknowledge that the work done by the PAC is impressive. I, too, wish to refer to just three of four reports that have been important to me, as well as to my constituents and others. The first such report, to which reference has been made, is the one on the Ministry of Defence and the Chinook Mk 3. Although my constituency is that of South-East Cornwall, it is close to Devonport dockyard and the Royal Marines, and many of my constituents have direct relationships with our troops. Within that community, and slightly wider than that, the saga of the Chinook Mk 3—those eight years of incompetence and bad decision-making, let alone the enormous cost and so on—has gone down extremely badly. At a time when we have seen inefficiencies and the lack of some equipment, the thought that millions of pounds have been wasted on machines that will not even get into the air for years and the basic mismanagement that that has brought out has left a sour taste in a number of people’s mouths. The Ministry of Defence appears to have frittered away, through bad decisions, millions and millions of pounds, yet it seems to be penny pinching on some of the vital equipment that our troops need when they go into theatre. Clearly, many lessons can be learned across the board about the way in which contracts are negotiated, if we cannot get that sort of agreement with our so-called allies—with the people who are supposedly helping us in these situations. I am at a loss to understand how we have got to a situation in which we cannot sort out the software source coding with a great deal more alacrity. The next report—the 11th report, on the UK’s future nuclear deterrent—follows on from that. Devonport dockyard is the home of Trident when it is being refitted. It has been an enormous boost to the local economy and significant numbers of my constituents work there. The beginning of the debate on Trident has been watched with great interest and this report is a good start to what ought to be a full debate on the costs of the defence side as well as on all other aspects relating to this major policy area.