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Mr. Barry Gardiner (Brent, North): The Chief Secretary to the Treasury set the welcome tone of the debate by his willingness to take interventions from both sides and by his commitment to listen and to enter into dialogue with the Public Accounts Committee and other bodies so that we may work through the perceived criticisms of the Bill as it stands.

Resource-based accountancy and budgeting will bring enormous benefits that will be welcomed by right hon. and hon. Members on both sides. It will ensure that the full economic costs of Government activities are properly measured, improve the way in which capital spending is treated in Government accounts, and explicitly link departmental goals to departmental spending.

However, parts of the Bill have given hon. Members pause for thought. My right hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Sheldon) spoke eloquently of the need for parallel operation. Part of the process of building towards resource accounting and budgeting has been the trigger points.

Trigger point 2 said that Departments should provide opening balance sheets for the 1999-2000 financial year on a resource basis. That was due to be implemented by June. In July, however, the Treasury did not report that all Departments had met that trigger by providing resource-based opening balance sheets. Instead, it said that all Departments were on track to produce auditable resource accounts for 1999-2000. The clear implication was that trigger point 2 had not been met. Will my hon. Friend the Economic Secretary clarify exactly how many Departments succeeded in preparing resource-based opening balance sheets by June? If she cannot, will she write to me?

Trigger point 3 said that all Departments should prepare dry-run resource accounts for 1998-99 by autumn this year. The Treasury was due to report on progress by the turn of the year, but the Chief Secretary said that he believed that report would be forthcoming in February. As the current Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr. Davis), pointed out earlier in the debate, the NAO expected 53 dry-run accounts by mid-August, but, by the beginning of November, only 22 had been received. Will the Economic Secretary advise the House how many Departments, at today's date, still have not supplied the NAO with the dry-run accounts that were due earlier this year? If she cannot give us that information this evening, perhaps she could send it to me.

Will the Economic Secretary confirm whether every branch of the Treasury itself has supplied the dry-run resource-based accounts for 1998-99? If, as I believe, there are significant delays, I have two further questions: why has the Treasury not exercised better oversight of Departments in maintaining the timetable that was set, and on what basis does the Treasury request that the House proceed with the introduction of resource-based accounts when we have not had the opportunity to see a draft set of resource-based accounts for every Department against a cash-based set?

The Chairman of the Procedure Committee, the hon. Member for Macclesfield (Mr. Winterton), alluded to the Committee's second report, on resource accounting and budgeting, published in June 1998. The report concluded:

"We are unwilling to give the plans our unqualified approval until we are sure the timetable will allow outstanding problems to be identified and resolved before the new system is introduced. It is

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important that the Treasury reports progress against the 'trigger points' to Parliament, and that any delay is explained promptly. The decision as to whether the target date for implementation is still viable must not be taken on the basis of information available to the Treasury alone."

Have dry-run resource accounts automatically been made available to the relevant departmental Select Committees, as the Procedure Committee requested?

In his opening remarks, the Chief Secretary said that he continued to regard the triggers as extremely important. Will the Economic Secretary assure us that implementation of resource accounting and budgeting will not occur until all those important trigger points have been met? Will she confirm that the Bill, which contains no mention of trigger points, overrides the commitments given by the Treasury on the series of trigger points? I urge my hon. Friend to adopt the old Latin motto "festina lente" as her guide; let us make haste slowly on this matter, lest we make no progress at all.

The Government want to stop cash-based accounting from April 2001. The Chief Secretary must reassure the House that Departments will be ready to go live at that time. The only way to do that properly will be to have parallel accounts from April 2000. The Bill not only gives the Treasury the power to vary the date of implementation of resource accounting, but, in clause 18, it provides the Treasury with the power to specify different dates for the production of accounts. Those powers should be vested not in the Treasury but in Parliament.

If the Treasury were given such power, it would be equivalent to a company, under the Companies Acts, being able to produce its accounts at any time of the year that it chose--any time that it deemed suitable and found convenient. We would not accept that as a way of regulating companies; we should not accept it as a way of regulating Government affairs. I trust that the Economic Secretary will consider such a clause from the perspective that Labour Members retain from opposition--not simply from the perspective of Government.

Other right hon. and hon. Members have made much of the fact that the Bill honours the letter, but not the principle, of the Exchequer and Audit Departments Acts of 1866 and 1921. I disagree; there has been a fundamental change to the letter of the law. In the 1866 Act, the Comptroller and Auditor General is given a right of access. It says:

"In order that such examination may as far as possible proceed pari passu with the . . . transactions of the several accounting departments, the Comptroller and Auditor General shall have free access, at all convenient times, to the books of account and other documents".

The Bill says not that the CAG "shall have" but that

"A department shall . . . allow . . . access at all reasonable times to any record relating to the department's accounts and"--

a Department shall provide--

"explanations of the department's transactions to the Comptroller on request."

That is the difference between access as a right of the Comptroller and access as an obligation on a Department. To give someone a right to access and to put a Department under an obligation to provide that person with access are very different beasts indeed. The legislation has not merely been updated; the burden of legislation has shifted.

I believe that the Government have no intention of changing the effect of legislation in this matter, but they cannot vouchsafe the same good intentions for future

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Governments. Many Members have pointed out that changes in the organisation of government have led to Governments spending money in ways other than simply through Departments. Currently, we have executive agencies, executive non-departmental bodies, national health service bodies, local spending bodies and contractors. They all spend money to which the CAG has no statutory right of access. The Housing Corporation spends £1 billion of public funds each year; English Partnerships spends £250,000 million, and the Environment Agency spends £300 million. There are NHS bodies, housing associations and training and enterprise councils. The private sector prisons contract alone is for £4 billion. The NAO has a statutory right of access to none of those; access must be negotiated through Departments.

It has already been pointed out that the Bill does not change that situation--that is absolutely correct. However, is it right that the Bill does not change the situation? I urge the Government to consider whether this would be a convenient and proper time to introduce right to roam legislation to give the CAG an unfettered right to roam wherever public money is being spent--to give him the right to pursue and to scrutinise those funds wherever they are spent and by whom. By extending the scope of the Bill in that way, the Government would reduce problems for themselves in the future. I remind the Economic Secretary that, for every new executive non-departmental body set up since May 1997--from the Commission for Health Improvement and the Competition Commission to the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts and the eight Regional Development Agencies--the Government have asked the CAG to be the auditor and have laid the accounts before the House of Commons. The Government's practice has, therefore, been absolutely unimpeachable. However, Labour Members ask the Government to set in statute what they already grant in practice and what we commend them for.

I remind the House that, on occasions, the Comptroller and Auditor General has not had such access to bodies set up by the previous Administration. When it came to investigating the national lottery, the Government and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said that access should be provided. However, Camelot and its private auditors refused to provide that access. Fortunately, the National Lottery Act 1998 was before the House at that time and it was possible to incorporate into it a provision to give the Comptroller and Auditor General access to the national lottery. Such a convenient and easy remedy will not always be before the House to provide the Comptroller and Auditor General with access to any organisation to which he does not have a statutory right of access. Given the enormous sums of public money that are spent through such organisations, it is vital that the Comptroller and Auditor General should have such access.

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