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Mr. Borrow: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: Perhaps the hon. Gentleman can enlighten us. I shall give way just once more.

Mr. Borrow: The right hon. Gentleman would not give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) when she challenged him about public expenditure on the dome. Will he acknowledge that there is no public expenditure on the dome and that the money comes from the lottery? Will he correct his inaccuracies?

Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: That is irrelevant. A plastic tent costing £750 million is being erected in Greenwich while 512,000 people are waiting to get on a waiting list. That is a shameful reflection on new Labour's priorities.

Fiona Mactaggart: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way on that point?

Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: No. [Interruption.]

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The right hon. Gentleman is not giving way.

Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I have given way generously; others wish to participate and I hope that the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) will speak in due course. I hope that we shall have a long debate, to which many hon. Members will have the opportunity to contribute.

Nothing justifies the fact that 512,000 people cannot get on a waiting list to see a consultant.

Fiona Mactaggart: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: No. I want to speak about another subject--Labour's task forces. The Government do not know their number or the identity of their members. I asked for a list of members of task forces, but the Government could not provide it. They published a White Paper called "Your Right to Know", but they do not even know how many people their task forces comprise. They did, however, provide some examples, which include: a white-headed duck task force; eight regional task forces to support "Waiting List Action"--no one knows what that is because it is yet to issue a report although it was established in November 1997; the NHS efficiency task force, which was set up in June 1997

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and has yet to report; and a private finance task force. The latter is interesting because it includes no Ministers, but its project arm is constituted as a private limited company. The Government do not know who sits on the task forces, yet one of them has set up a private limited company. Someone should look into that.

Mr. Dale Campbell-Savours (Workington): There have been successful task forces, some of which were set up by the Tory Government in the early 1980s. The right hon. Gentleman was a Member of Parliament when the right hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine) set up several task forces, including one in Liverpool, which was extremely successful, after the riots there. Before he condemns the idea behind task forces, which comprise private and public sector members working on projects in partnership, he should learn a little history.

Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: I am sure that there is useful work to be done by task forces, but when we set them up, we knew their number, who served on them and when they reported. Most of those that I mentioned have not reported, so we do not know whether or not they are successful.

It is truly alarming that the Government do not know the cost of the task forces. I tabled an innocent parliamentary question about the cost of setting up and servicing them, and the Government did not know the answer. I asked about the rules that applied to the selection and conduct of the appointees, but there are none. The new Labour state is unaccountable, expanding and expensive.

The cost of administration by Government Departments has increased by £1.1 billion since the general election. That includes the doubling of the cost of special political advisers in the Departments. We conducted a larger exercise to consider waste in the public sector. A preliminary trawl through some Departments has already identified £410 million of waste and extravagance. That includes the passport fiasco in the summer, which cost almost £30 million, including £16,000 to buy umbrellas for the unfortunate members of the public who had to wait in the rain while the Home Office tried to sort out the mess. There has been an overspend of £20 million on the BSE inquiry, which will be 18 months late. That will not help a single farmer.

Mr. Alan W. Williams: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way on that point?

Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: I shall not give way again. If I owe any hon. Member an intervention, it is the hon. Member for Slough. If she wants to intervene now, I shall give way.

Fiona Mactaggart: Why should we take any notice of the right hon. Gentleman, whose grasp of history is so vague that he ignores the initial responsibility for the dome, and whose grasp of economics is so peculiar that he suggests a link between spending lottery money on the dome and delays in the NHS? The Government have liberated money from the lottery to improve the

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health service. The right hon. Gentleman's point is as logical as complaining that people are building private houses while the dome is being built.

Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: I am not sure whether that was worth waiting for.

Mr. Barry Gardiner (Brent, North): Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: I shall not give way again because I have already dealt with the point.

We found more than £100 million of fraud in the distribution of benefits from local government. Nine separate consultants have been appointed to advise the Government on the privatisation of the London underground. However, because the Government keep changing their mind--or having it changed for them by the hon. Member for Brent, East (Mr. Livingstone)--most of the expenditure is wasted. It had already totalled £18.5 million by May this year, and the figure is almost certain to have increased greatly by now.

When the Prime Minister was challenged about expenditure on the euro last week, he refused to give a figure for expenditure on the national handover plan. Later, his spokesman gave a figure to journalists, but it did not include expenditure by Government Departments on the changeover to the euro, which is already happening. The figure is a secret.

Let us consider the fiasco of gold sales. An independent estimate has shown that selling gold in a falling market to buy euros has already cost £26.2 million--a highly conservative estimate.

Mr. Gardiner rose--

Mr. Nigel Griffiths rose--

Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: A superficial trawl through some Departments' expenditure reveals a total of £410 million of waste.

Mr. Gardiner rose--

Mr. Plaskitt rose--

Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: I shall not give way again. The figures that I have just outlined constitute the public expenditure that the Government do not like to discuss. They are mirrored by the expenditure about which the Government like to boast. That leads us back to our old friend, fiddled figures. A good example is the announcement by the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food on 20 September of a £530 aid package to farmers. Some of the more gullible members of the press took that at face value and described it as a £500 million rescue package. The Agriculture Committee has done us all a service by producing a report that has shown that no less than £293 million of that had to be paid anyway under the existing rules. A further £94 million had already been paid; £60 million simply maintained the existing hill livestock compensatory allowance; and another £89 million represented a simple deferral of extra future

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charges, which left only £1 million of extra money. The Committee, which has a Labour majority, said that that had led to "misunderstanding and disappointment" in the farming community--I am not at all surprised.

The Government are disguising the elements of public expenditure that they do not like and fiddling the figures in their boasts about other items of public expenditure.

Mr. Gardiner: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: No, I am about to finish.

Labour's economic policy simply amounts to almost endless repetition and repackaging and the re-announcement of bits of public expenditure. Meanwhile, it is entirely silent about the huge and growing failure to reform the welfare state as promised. All that is paid for by stealth taxes, which are then fiddled to disguise the truth. That is a pretty nasty record about which we shall no doubt hear more from my hon. Friends.

I hope that Labour Members recognise the quotes with which I shall close my remarks, because they come from their new colleague, the hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Woodward), who had this to say about Labour economic policy:


Incidentally, he said that last month. He also said:


He also commented:


That is what a member of the parliamentary Labour party thinks of the Government's economic policy, and I agree with him.


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