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Mr. Timms: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. Before he concludes, I wanted to ask him
about a point that he made earlier in his speech. He said that the new clause would not give the NAO further access than the Government have, but, as I understand subsection (8), it sets up an endless chain of paying bodies and receiving bodies, which could allow the NAO to go further than the Government can go. Where in the new clause does the right hon. Gentleman believe there is a restraint on that?
Mr. Davis: I shall make two points to the Minister. As with the previous new clause, if he says that the problem is simply one of drafting, I am happy to accept his undertaking that he will come back to it in the Lords and correct it accordingly. However, I was referring to subsection (2), which lays down the categories that were intended. As the Minister will imagine, we took parliamentary counsel's advice on the matter. If he is correct in his description, I am happy for the new clause to be corrected at a later stage.
In conclusion, the resistance to the new clause is misplaced on all counts. I have tried hard, as has the National Audit Office's counsel on my behalf, to find a form of words that removes unintended consequences. It is simply a matter of accountability to the taxpayer for the way in which public money is spent.
We all want public services to evolve in the modern world. As I said in the Committee--the Minister smiled at the time--I am that strange thing, a right-wing Tory who believes in public services. We all want them to evolve. We want the taxpayer to get a good deal, and we want to be able to prove it. We do that by setting in statute the principle that Parliament and the taxpayer's auditor has the access necessary to do its job.
Amendment No. 17 deals with whole of Government accounts and access in that respect. I shall not go into great detail. The arguments are similar to those that I made to the Minister in Committee. It is the Comptroller and Auditor General's opinion that, under the accounting standards under which he is required to work, he has access to the subordinate accounts and the right to intervene or to require intervention from the subordinate auditors of the components of whole of Government accounts. If he is not able to have that access, he may have to qualify whole of Government accounts on those grounds. That is in nobody's interest. The new clause is designed not as a right to roam but for a specific purpose. If the Economic Secretary has a problem with it but says that the Treasury will table an amendment on the issue in another place, I will be happy to accept that.
Mr. Flight:
I support my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr. Davis), especially on new clause 3. We are considering complex and difficult territory, which will become more difficult still. Government amendment No. 21 does not tackle the problems with sufficient subtlety.
If we take as a starting point the obvious desire to protect and modernise Parliament's monitoring of the way in which public money is spent, we must face the fact that
auditing by the Comptroller and Auditor General will be inappropriate in many cases. Private finance initiative organisation means that public money will increasingly be spent on a subcontractor basis. Simply requiring audit or full access to follow all public money is not practical.
I repeat that it is clear from experience that it is unsatisfactory for Departments to act as gatekeepers to control the Comptroller and Auditor General's ability to monitor public money and unearth nasties. In many cases, too much time has been spent and too much difficulty encountered in gaining the necessary access.
The delicate question is where the line will be drawn. The Comptroller and Auditor General needs to be empowered with statutory rights in a way that is sufficiently flexible to permit some evolution. My right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden argued that access is not appropriate when we are simply considering the Government's buying of supplies. Doubtless the new Government procurement office is intended to deal in a commercial fashion with value for money in buying supplies.
It is difficult to decide where to draw the line. For example, some services are contracted out to the private sector. If I were running a business and providing to other parts of the private sector services similar to those that I provided to Government, I might believe that it was inappropriate for the Comptroller and Auditor General to redo the work that my auditor had undertaken. If I had done a deal with the Government to provide a service at a specific price, why should the matter go further, as long as I delivered the service? That gives rise to a question about checking whether the service has been provided. However, drawing the line about what merits access will prove increasingly difficult.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden suggested the guideline that right of access is clearly required when the Government reserve any rights of investigation. A right of access is clearly required when funds are collected and paid in a form that is analogous to the arrangements for the lottery. There is clearly a right of access where there is any form of public subsidy.
Despite being capitalist in the way in which I think, I understand that the more that is devolved and subcontracted to the private sector, the more scope there is in some senses for corruption, and that one must therefore err on the side of permitting more rather than less access. The whole debate--going back to the central PFI subcontracting issue--about access and PFI provisioning is not complete and will require a good bit more consideration.
Let me return to the very beginning. We are talking about public money. Ideally, Parliament, through the CAG, should be doing the monitoring and should have the necessary rights of access to follow up all such expenditure. At present, there are many areas, as we all know, where there is nowhere near sufficient access and where even the obtaining of access has taken far too long.
As methods of delivering public services change, the needs involved in handling such matters will change. It seems to me that the new clause goes a long way towards providing the necessary flexibility for the future, as well as the correct basis of a statutory right, and that it will permit, in the public interest, the weighting to be on the right side in terms of not impeding the Comptroller and Auditor General as present arrangements tend to do.
My understanding of the Government's alternative proposal, in amendment no. 21, is that it is much more limited and retains Government Departments as the gatekeeper: it would present great difficulties in the chain of potential subcontracting of the provision of services out of the public purse, whether involving PFI contracts or others.
I am not a lawyer technically qualified to know whether the drafting of the new clause fully ties up the considerable complications, but it has taken account of a great deal more than Government amendment No. 21, and deserves support in principle, if not in its present form. It represents rather more than Government amendment No. 21 embodies.
Mr. Edward Davey:
The House must choose tonight between new clause 3 and Government amendment No. 21, which seems to deal with only one of the original weaknesses in the Bill: the fact that clause 8 would have given access to the Comptroller and Auditor General only through the Departments acting as gatekeepers.
The Government heard our complaints in the Committee and have responded. We welcome the fact that amendment No. 21 shows that they listened and responded appropriately. However, the amendment does not deal with the second issue, which the new clause picks up--the need to extend the statutory right of access for the National Audit Office not only to departmental accounts and documents related to them but to other bodies which one would expect the National Audit Office to be able to audit. Therefore, the new clause is clearly preferable, and we shall support it.
I do not, however, believe that the new clause is perfect. The Minister pointed out in an exchange with the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr. Davis) that it might not restrict access sufficiently, and that it might open up a situation in which the National Audit Office could follow the supply of services from the private sector to the public sector far too far, so that it would have to go into far too much detail.
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