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It being Four o'clock, the motion for the Adjournment of the House lapsed, without Question put, pursuant to Order [24 June].
29 Jun 2004 : Column 210
Public Accounts
4 pm
Mr. Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con): I beg to move,
That this House takes note of the 1st to the 16th, and the 18th and 19th Reports of the Committee of Public Accounts of Session 2003–04, and of the Treasury Minutes and the Northern Ireland Department of Finance and Personnel Memorandum on these Reports, Cm 6130, 6136, 6155, 6175, 6191 and 6244.
It is a great pleasure to move a motion that stands in my name and those of the right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) and the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Allan), who is present. I welcome Members to what could be described as part two of the Public Accounts Committee debate. We thought that February's debate was successful, and decided there should be a sequel. We hoped that splitting the debate between two afternoons would make it more topical.
I think that PAC members will agree that the year continues to be successful for the Committee. Obviously, public sector efficiency is high on the political agenda. We have had reviews on accommodation from Sir Michael Lyons, and will shortly have one from Sir Peter Gershon on efficiency. Their efficiency agenda chimes with ours, and is always on our radar. On behalf of Parliament, we attempt to hold the Executive to account. We make recommendations for savings and improvements in public services, and we are ideally placed to report on whether the savings sought by Government have been realised.
I want to take this opportunity not just to go through all our reports, but to explore a couple of themes. Others may wish to draw on that. The main theme is delivery of efficient and effective public services, and making them relevant to the citizen. We believe that our work over the past three years has saved upwards of £1.5 billion. Every year, 90 per cent. of the Committee's recommendations are accepted by the Government, because we eschew any party political recommendations. We think that we do hold the Government to account, but we try to do so from a positive perspective. We try to congratulate the Government when they make a success of things, and when mistakes are made we hope that our warnings will help them to ensure that those mistakes are not repeated. We hope that the good practice we identify will be heralded and shared as widely as possible in Whitehall.
It has been a busy year for the Committee. So far we have published 26 reports, and we shall probably have published nearly 50 by the time the Session ends—far more than any other Select Committee. Our work covers almost every part of Government, from the major Whitehall Departments such as the Department of Health and the Ministry of Defence to much smaller agencies that do not normally appear on the political radar, such as the Forensic Science Service and the Veterans Agency. We could not do any of that work without the help of our able Committee staff, headed by Nick Wright, and the 800 staff of the National Audit Office, headed by the Comptroller and Auditor General, Sir John Bourn. We pay tribute to Sir John: we could not do our work at all without his help.
We also try to be topical. Earlier this year, we took evidence from those operating in Iraq. I shall not deal with Iraq in detail; we can return to it in our next debate
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when the Government have replied. Just over a week ago we had a hearing on visa entry into the United Kingdom, and tomorrow we shall consider the Home Office's work on processing asylum applications.
There have been some changes. Sadly, we have had to lose my hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Mr. Osborne), who has become a Front-Bench spokesman. On this Committee at least, we have preserved the principle that spokesmen from the main Opposition parties should not sit on a Select Committee. I consider that an important principle. I know that it is often difficult for the Conservative party to provide people to serve on Select Committees, but I think it is important for the Public Accounts Committee—which is non-political, and is the main vehicle for scrutiny of the Government in terms of economy and efficiency—not to include Opposition spokesmen. I hope that that principle will continue to be followed. Because we hold to that principle, however, we have acquired a couple of good new members from the Conservative party: my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Mrs. Browning) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry). I should say that we welcome back my right hon. Friend, because he served on the Committee before the start of his distinguished ministerial career.
At the heart of our work and hearings is our interrogation of senior Government officials. The PAC is a testing Committee, but we were rather amused to hear that one of our witnesses had paid up to £1,500 an hour to be coached on how to appear in front of it. I am pleased to say that the hon. Member for City of Durham (Mr. Steinberg), who is in his place today, immediately offered to provide on his retirement—something that we regret, because he is a very worthwhile member of our Committee—a far cheaper service to the witnesses who appear in front of us in future.
The Committee is testing, but I make no apology for that. It is extremely important that permanent secretaries, who often live in a rarefied atmosphere, should be held to account. It is also important that key contractors to the Government should be held to account for how they have used or misused public money. At the same time, we try to be fair, to give praise where it is due and to help the Government to highlight good practice.
We have also continued to visit the front line. For example, we had a successful visit to a drug treatment and testing order centre in Ealing in May. I hope that we can continue those visits.
It is easy to be complacent in these debates, but I hope that we are never complacent about our Committee. I was interested to read recently in Anthony Sampson's "Who runs this place: the anatomy of Britain in the 21st century," which is an update on his earlier work:
"Debates in the Chamber have always been a distraction from the more continuous duty of MPs: to supervise the executive over which they theoretically have sovereignty, and to call it to account—as Gladstone had told them in 1869",
which was shortly after he founded this Committee. Mr. Sampson says:
"The central instrument of parliament for enforcing accountability is the Public Accounts Committee"
and I am pleased to say that he described it as
"much the most prestigious of parliamentary committees".
However, that is where his praise for the system ends. So that we do not become complacent, I must say that Mr. Sampson says later:
"The effectiveness of the auditor-general depends on the Public Accounts Committee, which suffers from the same weaknesses as other select committees, with their party-political agendas and their short horizons; in any case, the PAC is no match for the complexities and obfuscations of Whitehall."
I say that because I do not want this debate to be just a pat on the back, and I want to reply to that charge straight away. It is important not to get into the groove of party politics; we should avoid that. A book, by David Lipsey, "The Secret Treasury" makes the mild criticism of the PAC that we deal with events after they take place. However, I think that we have to do that, otherwise we would be involved in the party political process. Mr. Lipsey says that we should devote more resources to publicising our reports. We already get more press publicity than any other Select Committee, but we can and must do better. He also says that we can still look at modernising our procedures. We try to be modern and up to date, but it is important that we recognise what commentators are saying, that we are open-minded and that we constantly try to improve the way in which we do our business.
Select Committees need to respond to what emerged from Hutton. They need to be more vigorous. They need to be prepared to test the Government more, and to call for papers that have hitherto not been in the public domain. We will do all that with the help of the National Audit Office, and it is my hope—and the hope of the right hon. Member for Swansea, West—that other Select Committees will in time gradually increase the resources available to them so that they are similar to those that we have in the Public Accounts Committee. There are things that we could do better, but we take very seriously, and are very proud of, our record in holding the Executive to account.
Let me deal with my two themes, the first of which is service delivery and its relationship to efficiency. Everyone—from top officials to those at the coalface—needs to make the recent increases in Government spending count. Regardless of which side of the political divide members of the Committee come from, we do not take issue with the Government on whether or not these increases are right. That is not our business; rather, we are concerned with ensuring that these massive increases in public spending, particularly on health and education, actually count. They must be translated into a clear improvement in front-line services.
During this debate, we can look at many of the reports that address this issue, so let us consider one or two. We followed up a previous National Audit Office inquiry into the medical assessment of incapacity and disability benefits. We found that, as result of our recommendations being implemented, the average time taken to process medical examinations had fallen by seven weeks, so that is an example of a delivery gain actually being achieved. Recipients of incapacity and disability benefits now get a decision more quickly on the benefits that they need and to which they are properly entitled. I should add, however, that such improvement in service is entirely compatible with making efficiency gains. By reducing significantly the backlog of delays in making decisions about benefits,
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the Department has saved the taxpayer £29 million. The improvements, if sustained, will lead to future savings of some £21 million each year, so that, too, is a gain.
Improvements in public services are not just about what the customer gets at the end of the process, be it a benefit payment or a new passport; the actual experience of dealing with government is also important. Our 26th report, on difficult forms—it was published this morning—makes a number of recommendations that will hopefully help to reduce the burden of bureaucracy on the citizen. Forms need to be shorter and easier to complete, and people should not have to provide the same information to several Government Departments, let alone several times to the same Department. Forms might sound a boring subject and perhaps it is; but it would add enormously to the happiness of many people if forms were short, and easy to fill in and to understand.
So I emphasise again that better services and efficiency improvements can be two sides of the same coin. At the same time as improving the experience of the customer, Departments can reduce their own administrative costs and therefore do more for the public. For example, the Inland Revenue's introduction of the short tax return for some customers should result in more efficient processing. It is a shame, however, that the Revenue does not yet know the relative costs of processing the short form and the standard one. Perhaps bureaucracies have a rule whereby all forms, however long or short, take the same time to process—I do not know.
I am afraid to say that the claim by some public bodies to place the consumer at the heart of their work is somewhat exaggerated. As our report "Helping consumers benefit from competition in telecommunications" shows, customers are still not getting as good a deal as they could on their telephone bills. Twenty years after the telephone market was liberalised, British Telecom still has a staggering 70 per cent. of the market. Customers could save money by switching supplier or changing their tariff.
When we published the report, some apologists for BT had a go at the Committee, but I make no apology for standing up for the customer and the consumer in this instance—or, indeed, in all instances. The truth is that people find the telecommunications market confusing. We found that Oftel was remote from consumers. It did not do enough to help them to make properly informed choices, and it spent only a tiny fraction of its budget on publicity. Its successor, Ofcom, must now disseminate guidance on how to identify the best supplier, and do more to draw public attention to the savings available by switching supplier.
Two of our more recent reports looked specifically at agencies' efforts to improve their service delivery. Our fourth report was about the Forensic Science Service. The service's direct customers are the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and Customs and its work is increasingly important. Any delay in forensic analysis can mean suspects being bailed, charges being dropped and court cases being jeopardised, but the timeliness of the agency's performance is very disappointing. It has missed targets every year since the Committee last looked into the subject. DNA samples, for example, were waiting on the shelf for two weeks before being
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analysed, even though the analysis takes less than a day and a half. The agency must turn around its performance and maximise the use and efficiency of its laboratories.
Our 20th report looked at the Veterans Agency and was published shortly before the nation commemorated D-day. We found that, by and large, veterans were receiving the service to which they were entitled, but in some areas the agency can and should do a lot better. For example, we found that the targets placed on the agency were undemanding and we were particularly concerned that new claims for war disablement pensions took a staggering 131 days to complete—more than four months and well in excess of the agency's own target. Surely veterans who have suffered injury on behalf of their country deserve a better service than that.
I was particularly concerned about the treatment of Gurkhas. I received a letter from the Minister this week, emphasising that Gurkhas would be eligible to receive pensions under the war pensions scheme, so I believe that we have made some progress.
No Public Accounts Committee debate is complete without someone talking about information technology disasters. In the last debate, I noted that Libra, the national IT project for magistrates courts, was the latest in a long list of public IT disasters. Sadly, in our 14th report on the Inland Revenue's new tax credit system, we had yet another sorry tale to tell. The introduction of the new system was nothing short of disastrous for public service. Hundreds of thousands of claimants were not paid on time, which led to hardship among some of the most vulnerable people in society. Inconvenience was created for employers and employees, and other aspects of the Revenue's business were disrupted. The accounting officer, Sir Nicholas Montague, admitted that public confidence in the Revenue had been severely dented.
I believe that IT systems need to work effectively to serve the public properly, but we also need to ensure that we avoid wasted public spending. In fact, considerable sums could be saved. Under the old tax credit system, the Revenue was making overpayments that could total as much as a staggering £700 million a year. In that case, roll-out happened, even though people knew that the pilot studies were inadequate.
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