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Public Bodies Bill [HL]

My Lords, my amendment would add the Audit Commission to Schedule 1. I move it not because I wish to abolish the Audit Commission—quite the reverse—but because I wish to probe the thinking of the Government on why it has been excluded from the Bill while other bodies have been included in Schedule 1. The utterances of Conservative Ministers in the coalition have been extremely critical of the Audit Commission and there has been a steady trickle of briefing against it from within the CLG so I, in my naivety, had rather assumed that Mr Eric Pickles would have been rather keen to rid himself of this body at the earliest legislative opportunity. Perhaps, let us hope, he has had a damascene conversion against abolition but more probably, as I suspect from my own intelligence, it is proving a bit more difficult than he thought to dismember the Audit Commission. That sort of impetuosity is typical of the way in which much of this Bill has been produced: decide first and think about what the reasons were afterwards. I should acknowledge that, over the years, my path has crossed several times with the Audit Commission, so I could be said to have an interest to declare. In 1986, the commission produced an excellent report on community care which, to their credit, the Conservative Government acted upon. I was very involved with the reforms that followed that commission report, and again, 10 years later in 1996, when the commission produced a withering critique on the state of the youth justice system under the Conservatives that in its turn led to the establishment of the Youth Justice Board in 1999—an issue that we will debate later under an amendment in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. Then, when I was a Health Minister, the commission helped to sort out some arcane, unworkable NHS accounting rules and provided much technical help on NHS reform, certainly to me. The fact that this commission has been capable for many decades of speaking truth to power has been a continuing feature of its work, but it seems to be a quality that has been little valued by some senior Ministers in the coalition Government. The way that this Bill has been produced rather confirms that. I will not spend a lot of time today explaining why abolition of the Audit Commission is a thoroughly bad decision and will do much damage to good governance and efficiency in the public sector. There will be plenty of time to do that when, as I suspect, the Government eventually find a way to swing the legislative axe next year. However, I shall mention one issue that affects many public bodies but which, it is clear, has not been adequately thought about before the Government decided to abolish the Audit Commission—how to ensure that all local public bodies have an audit system based on clear principles of independence. We will not go into that tonight but I want to register that point. There is no doubt that the Audit Commission has curbed the fees of the big accountancy firms for auditing public bodies and that its removal is likely to unleash significant increases in public expenditure thereafter. This is the kind of thing that we would expect to have spelt out in any impact assessment on legislation on the Audit Commission. However, if one looks at this Bill, one actually sees what I can only describe as contempt for Parliament, with the publication of an impact assessment that has no costs and benefits assessment in it about these bodies in Schedule 1. There is nothing there to tell us what the benefits and costs are of doing the things that the Government want done through Schedule 1. That is one reason why many of us are so concerned about the Bill. Some of us would say that the impact assessment produced for the Bill is a scandal and is contemptuous of Parliament. That is one reason why the Minister is going to find, as we plod our way through Schedule 1, that we continue on body after body to ask for information—the same thing was asked earlier today—about the costs of deleting and abolishing these bodies and what the benefits are. If the Government had done it properly in the Bill’s impact assessment, they would be making faster progress. I do not want to carry on too far in that vein, but I remember some of the speeches that Mr Francis Maude made before the election about this; getting rid of quangos was all about saving money. I want to ask why, in an exercise that started off being about saving public money, we do not have any figures about the costs and benefits of getting rid of these bodies. I now turn to the main reason for this amendment. I am afraid that I have a lot of questions for the Minister and let me assure him that they are not rhetorical. Do the Government still intend to abolish the Audit Commission, or have they had a change of heart? If so, how do they propose to do it, given that the commission is not in Schedule 7, so cannot be brought within the scope of the Bill? If the Government are going to use bespoke primary legislation to deal with changes to the Audit Commission, as seems to be the case, why are they not applying the same approach to some of the bodies in Schedule 1? For example, why is there not specific primary legislation amending the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 to make the changes to the Youth Justice Board that they seek? Why are bodies such as the Youth Justice Board being treated differently from the Audit Commission when their functions and membership were all set out in primary legislation after due consideration by Parliament? There is not a scrap of difference between some of the bodies in Schedule 1 and the Audit Commission in that regard. Can the Minister give the House any coherent explanation of why the Government are picking and choosing between different bodies on the legislative way they make changes to them? If so, what is that explanation? If the Government cannot give those kinds of explanations, why should this House not, as part of its constitutional duty, continue to debate every body in Schedule 1 one by one, to find out what was behind the Government’s thinking and how they propose to change functions and to alter and amend the nature of the affected bodies? I draw attention, without being too vainglorious, to the fact that as a Health Minister I abolished 20 arm’s-length bodies. However, if you go back over the records, you will see that we plodded our way through, organisation by organisation, bringing primary legislation to both Houses of Parliament, setting out the arguments as to why it was important to make changes and what were the legislative requirements for making those changes. People had a chance to put their views and we had some tussles in this House and in the other place about some of those changes. The Government are not giving Parliament the opportunity to do that on many of the important bodies which they have decided are for the chop in Schedule 1. I would like answers to the questions I have posed. I understand that the Minister may not be able to answer them all today, but I would like answers well before Report as to why the Government are picking and choosing how they deal with particular bodies. I do not think that it will be too taxing for the Government to answer my questions. We have heard that the Government carefully scrutinised the 900 or so bodies that have been looked at since May before coming to the conclusions that they have reached. As an old Whitehall hand, I am sure that tucked away in the cupboards and computers of Whitehall are umpteen files—in digital or another form—that set out the careful analysis that has no doubt gone into the decisions reflected in Schedule 1. There will have been detailed cost-benefit analyses of each of these bodies before they were put in Schedule 1. No doubt great care was taken with the accounting officers in those departments to make sure that there would be no minutes of their reservations. I look forward to seeing the Minister’s arguments for why they have taken a different approach for the Audit Commission from their approach to many of the bodies in Schedule 1. I spent some time picking over the disparity between what the Government are doing with the Audit Commission and their approach to the bodies in the Bill. This is because I have grave concerns about giving Secretaries of State—who, historically, may not be all that long in their jobs—powers to sweep away bodies about which they get a bee in their bonnet. All of us who have been Ministers get a bee in our bonnet from time to time about people who may be thwarting us or giving us uncomfortable messages. It does not mean that we reach for the axe or turn the screws on particular bodies to vent our spleen. We are getting nervous messages from many of these bodies about this approach, which makes me think that we need to hold the Government much more to account over the Bill than they might wish. That is why Schedule 7 is so dangerous. It is a list of 150 bodies over which any number of Secretaries of State can work themselves up into a lather and behave—if I may say so—probably in an extremely British way but, nevertheless, in a way that exerts pressure on the thinking and behaviour of those bodies. We need a more measured approach and we need the Government to come cleaner than they have about the arguments for and against dealing with the bodies in the way they propose in Schedule 1. I beg to move.