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Comprehensive Spending Review

I am a member of the Public Accounts Committee. Sadly, the Chair left the Chamber a few minutes ago, but we still have some other members here. It is the Committee's task, usually twice a week, to listen to a saga of Government mismanagement and overspending: some of the cases that we hear about are quite breathtaking, running into billions of pounds. I could give lots of examples, but those who are interested should take a look at the National Audit Office reports. It is absolutely clear from those reports that there is massive potential to save money in the operation of government. I would like specifically to talk about the report on the previous comprehensive spending review in 2007, which required sustainable value-for-money savings of £35 billion over three years, a period which ends next April. That illustrates the phoniness of saying that everything was fine before the credit crunch. The previous Government clearly knew that spending was getting out of hand, and a year before the credit crunch they looked for £35 billion of savings. It is interesting that that is nearly half of what is proposed in the current CSR. So how is it going, judged against the 2007 review? Some £15 billion of savings have so far been identified, but when the National Audit Office examined the matter it said that 18% of that did not represent improvements in value for money, and it rejected 44% on the basis that the Departments did not have the cost and performance information to underwrite their claims, so only 38%—£6 billion—has actually been saved. It is clear that the current spending review has to be tougher because of the failure to deliver the previous spending review. As the report that we agreed just yesterday in the Public Accounts Committee states, if Departments had been successful in making real savings of 3%, fewer painful cuts would be necessary now.