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Mr. Curry: Without for a minute accepting the implications of the hon. Gentleman's remarks, the intention of the change is simply technical. I will ask the Audit Commission to undertake that whatever figures are produced are absolutely comparable, so that there is no question about their transparency.
Mr. Dobson: I thank the Minister for that undertaking.
That is all the Bill does, so it is now a question of what it should it do. All over the country, people feel that the audit service is not doing its work properly. It is not coping with the major scandals which have arisen in councils of all political persuasions. I am not making a party political point. It has not coped well with scandals in Labour, Tory and Liberal Democrat councils.
It is no good going on as we are. Not long ago, I listened to a former Environment Minister moaning on the radio about wrongdoing in Lambeth, which he was perfectly entitled to do. The interviewer then asked him what he was going to do about it, to which the former Minister replied that there was nothing he could do. There has been nothing they could do about Lambeth for a decade, or about Westminster for the past eight or nine years. There has been nothing they could do about wrongdoing in Wandsworth over the past few years, or in Brent over the past five years. "Nothing we can do about it" is no longer the answer.
If it is a truthful answer, it shows that the present law on auditing is not up to the job, because all the scandals have occurred under the present laws--laws that were introduced by the Government. Some of the major scandals have not even been dealt a glancing blow by the audit service.
Take the example of Lambeth council, which, until the last council election, was controlled by the Labour party. Its record was a disgrace, and what it did was damaging to the people of Lambeth. It now has a new chief executive, and, following the Appleby inquiry, and with a great deal of good will, generally speaking, from most councillors of all political persuasions, there is a commitment to sort things out. Some of that was done at the instigation of my hon. Friends the Members for Norwood (Mr. Fraser), for Vauxhall (Miss Hoey) and for Streatham (Mr. Hill). Things are being turned round, but the council needs a lot of help.
Let us consider the role of the audit service in relation to a decade or more of things going wrong in Lambeth. The audit service itself has a lot to answer for. I make no excuses for what the council did. There were financial scandals, incompetence and fraud. Most of it was committed by officials of the council or by private contractors who had relationships with the council, but it continued for over a decade, and the audit service did little about it.
Scarcely anybody had their collar felt as a result of the audit service's activities. It produced a number of public interest reports but, once they had been produced, under the current law the council was not required to do anything in response to them.
Under the present law, as I understand it, the Audit Commission could not step in and do anything to correct what was wrong. There were limited powers for the
Secretary of State to step in if he decided that something was wrong, but it is not clear in the current law whether the auditor or the Audit Commission can ask the Secretary of State to step in. It would be useful to know whether any approaches were ever made to Ministers. We may never know whether approaches were made, because the Government prefer to make Tory propaganda out of the problems in Lambeth, rather than promote public propriety in that borough.
The history of what has happened in Lambeth, and the present system's incapacity to deal with what is going wrong, is one reason why we believe that substantial change is necessary. Our document on the future of local authorities, "Renewing Democracy, Rebuilding Communities"--which is usually mocked by the Secretary of State, if he can get to the Dispatch Box and if he does not rant on about something else--is committed to toughening up the audit service, so that it can deal with precisely the sort of situation that prevailed in Lambeth. Our document is also committed to tougher practices, and to giving the audit service more power.
All over the country, many hard-working councillors and council officials who are trying to promote public-private partnerships--which are, in theory, endorsed by the Government--find themselves obstructed at every turn by the district audit service, which ploughs through, asking them whether they have a statutory right to do this or that. While all that is happening, to the detriment of practically everybody, and at immense cost to local people and local businesses, the audit service performs poorly in picking up outright wrongdoing and fiddling, which is its primary purpose.
In future, councils should be required to publish plans for their services each year that set out cost and quality targets for each service. At the end of the year, councils would have to explain to the local people and to the audit service if they have not met the targets.
We suggest a new role for the audit service, if there are deplorable standards of service or things are persistently going deplorably wrong. Ministers cannot continue to say that there is nothing they can do. We believe that the law should be changed, so that, if the Audit Commission concludes that a service is continually and unjustifiably failing, it can require a council to prepare a plan to put things right, to set a timetable for them to be put right, to send in an advisory team to help the council to put matters right, and to check on the progress.
If the council is still failing, and if the Audit Commission recommends it to the Secretary of State, we believe that the Secretary of State should be empowered to appoint a management team to take over the service or services that are failing, and put them right. Far too frequently, the Government's answer to abominable management services is to put the services out to tender, thus endangering the jobs of the blue collar service workers, who are in no way responsible for the mismanagement that initially led to the problem. It is the management that needs to be sorted out.
It is not only in Lambeth that there have been persistent failures to do things properly and lawfully. Similar problems have been occurring in Brent for a long time. I shall leave it to my hon. Friends who represent that borough to spell out some of the things that have been happening there. Those improper practices have been unhampered by the audit service, because of the weakness of the present provisions in the law.
It is worth while to draw to the attention of the House the fact that, under a Government who claim to be committed to open government, there has been a scandal in Brent involving the Ad Shop, as it is called, on which a report has finally been prepared.
I have in my hand a sheet of paper setting out the undertakings that an elected councillor in Brent must sign before they will be given a copy of that report on the scandal of what has happened to public money in Brent. It is scandalous. They must undertake that they will not disclose its contents to anyone else. They must undertake to return the document to the chief executive for disposal. They must undertake not to discuss it, reveal it or pass it on to anyone else. That is about a scandalous and corrupt misuse of public money, yet councillors who are elected to represent local people and bring people to book are expected by a Tory council to sign that disgraceful undertaking.
Mr. Ken Livingstone (Brent, East):
I have seen a copy.
Mr. Dobson:
I believe that one or two copies have got about in spite of the undertakings, because, of course, fatuous undertakings are not binding on anyone; people should remember that.
Mr. Dennis Skinner (Bolsover):
We could achieve socialism with the aid of a few leaks and one or two photocopies.
Mr. Dobson:
What has happened in Wandsworth? The auditor reported that the council had acted unlawfully in relation to some of its housing duties. Nothing has happened.
That brings me to Westminster, which is a spectacular example all of its own. It has now descended into the depths of scandal, for three reasons.
The first scandal, which I shall return to, is the scandal of the political fraud and corruption that has been inherent in that council for a long time, and has resulted in the district auditor--we are discussing the audit service-- currently investigating the misapplication of £106 million by Westminster City council.
Secondly, there is a scandal that does not relate directly to the district audit service, but should relate to the Comptroller and Auditor General. That is the grotesque scandal by which Westminster City council receives enormous sums, far above those that are received by any other comparable area, all on the basis of that preposterous idea to which the Government subscribe-- that Westminster is the fourth most deprived place in Britain. No one in their right mind believes that Westminster is the fourth most deprived place in Britain.
Mr. Skinner:
The Audit Commission has never had sufficient money and resources to do the job properly, and has always attacked Labour authorities, in the main, that might spend a bit over the odds, rather than Tory authorities that spend underneath the odds. In addition, I have always believed that, since rate capping was introduced by the Tory Government, in many ways that has undermined the auditor's authority, because the Tory Government have decided on a political basis which councils should be hammered, with the result that the
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