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Alignment (Clear Line of Sight) Project

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for calling me in this important debate. The effective monitoring of Government expenditure and the exercise of control over it by the House of Commons is crucial to why we are here at all, but over the centuries it has become virtually impossible for ordinary Members of Parliament to understand what is going on. It is like the classic Schleswig-Holstein question—only three people understand it, and one of them is mad and one is dead. It is so complicated and so difficult. That is why I was happy to attempt to serve on the Liaison Committee in the last Parliament with Michael Jack, who was the Chairman of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee and John McFall, who was the Chairman of the Treasury Committee. We tried to gets our own heads around the subject, and it made our heads hurt to try and understand what was going on. I hope that some of the comments in our Liaison Committee report have found their way back into what the Government are trying to do—indeed, I know they have, because the previous Government replied to our report. There is nothing partisan about this. Both sides of the House are agreed that the present system is broken and we must do something about it. As we made clear in our report, the present arrangements present obstacles to sensible and informed scrutiny of public expenditure. It is extraordinary that we have estimates days, but we never discuss estimates. When I tried to interest the Liaison Committee in this work in the last Parliament, there was a collective groan from the Chairmen of the other Select Committees. They said that their people were interested in policy not money, but money is all-important. Policy flows from money. How extraordinary that after centuries of accumulation, like barnacles on the ship of state, we never discuss the Budget in detail. The Budget process is a farce—not the Budget statement, although in previous years, as we know, much of it was hidden in the Red Book. In the Finance Committee— the Committee that considers the Budget—there is only a matter of seconds available to consider each amendment. Scores of amendments are tabled, the Government swat them all away, and there is no proper debate, and the estimates days do not deal with estimates. My hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie) spoke about the American process, which works. The Office of Budget, a presidential body, proposes a budget. The President may propose, but Congress disposes. In our system, the Chancellor and the Prime Minister propose, and the Chancellor and the Prime Minister dispose. Parliament has very little effect on the process. In America, there are hundreds of hours of meetings on the budget process. I know that my hon. Friend mentioned pork barrel politics. That is a regrettable aspect of the process but it is often much exaggerated. Recently, Senator Byrd died at the grand old age of 90. I might still be here at the age of 90, boring the House with these matters. We know that Senator Byrd showered largesse on West Virginia, whereas it is impossible for me to give a single penny to Gainsborough, or in the case of my hon. Friend, to Chichester, but surely there is a sensible halfway house, so to speak, whereby the House can receive reasonable, sensible information, we can know what is going on, we can have estimates days that discuss the estimates, and we can make a difference. That is why I suggested in the last Parliament that there should be a triple lock on the scrutiny process. The right hon. Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge), the present Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, has already spoken in the debate. We have a superb post-audit system in the UK, perhaps one of the best in the world. Although we have one of the best audit systems in the world—actual audit systems through the National Audit Office, and parliamentary audit through the Public Accounts Committee—we have one of the weakest Budget processes. When the Hansard Society produced a report before the Liaison Committee examined the matter in the last Parliament, in terms of effective parliamentary scrutiny we were at the bottom of the heap, together with New Zealand, ranked lower than any other democratic Parliament in the world, bar none. Such was the weakness of our parliamentary control. What I suggested was a triple lock. We already have, as I say, a good audit system. Is it not surprising that it is so difficult to interest the other Select Committees in money? On education, for example, we had an hour and a half on a statement today with people battling over policy, yet it is difficult to get the Education Committee to get to grips with the education budget, from which those policies derive. I think we need a specialised Budget committee, which will be a Select Committee of the House and have a permanent membership, like other Select Committees. When, under the alignment project, the Government bring forward various proposals, there would have to be a trigger mechanism when any Department sought to increase its budget by a certain amount. That could trigger a potential inquiry by the Budget committee, which would have to be resourced by the scrutiny unit of the House and by the National Audit Office. Thus we would have a particular committee, a kind of appropriations committee, which is the most powerful congressional committee. It would have to have real teeth, not just be a talking shop. I hope my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester will not mind my relaying our private conversation earlier. He said that once we gave such a power to any Select Committee, pork barrel politics would inevitably flow from it. There would have to be safeguards, a process and gradual reform, as we always have in the House. No Government will suddenly surrender to a Select Committee or to Select Committees of the House the kind of powers that congressional committees have, but surely there is no harm in our waving the flag, as parliamentarians, for greater parliamentary control. We would have the PAC as a kind of audit system, and a Budget committee looking at the Budget in detail in a way that the Finance Bill Committee cannot do. The third part of the triple lock on wasteful spending in Government should be some kind of Star Chamber within Government. The Treasury do a fantastic job, but when spending was increasing very rapidly during the past 10 years, it was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of decisions pouring on to officials' desks. It was perhaps too much of a paper-based exercise. Perhaps the Chief Secretary could not get adequate control of it. I believe that Ministers and their officials who were proposing the expenditure of large sums of money should have to come before a Star Chamber to justify their proposals and to be questioned in private and give honest answers. I have served on four Select Committees of the House in more than 20 years. Do we ever have Ministers and officials giving entirely honest answers to our Select Committees? No, because those are held in public and Ministers and officials deal with questions by playing a dead bat. I am not denigrating the role of Select Committees and I quite understand the game that Ministers and officials play in front of them, but there has to be some equivalent process privately within Government, so that as expenditure plans are being dreamed up, there is proper control and reform. Such scrutiny will continue to be a dry subject which nobody understands or is interested in unless the Government, in the alignment process, listen to what we were trying to say. We said:""To be properly effective improvements in presentation need to be accompanied also by improved opportunities for Members—as individuals and through select committees and front benches—to debate the figures (both in the form of the formal Estimates for the current year and the spending plans for future years)."" That is absolutely vital. We want a clear line of sight and to know in simple terms, whether from the Department for Education or the Ministry of Defence, what they spent last year and plan to spend next year. There would be a day in Parliament when we could debate it and vote on it, and that would start to bring Parliament back into the process. In doing so, that would surely restore Parliament to what it should be about: Members acting on behalf of their constituents to control public money, so that very large sums of money are never again spent without adequate controls. That is a great prize. For all the technicalities of our discussion, for all the difficulties and for all the talk of "moving from cash to resource accounts", "the introduction to Government budgets" and "the concept of departmental expenditure limits"—all those words that, frankly, leave most Members cold—in the end, this is not a technical process. It is a process of real parliamentary democracy, and is therefore to be warmly welcomed.