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Mr. Jenkins: When I asked a question about that matter in 2002, the Minister said that a level playing field for open-source software had been achieved, but the pilot survey has still not been completed.

Mr. Allan: The hon. Gentleman is entirely correct. I am lobbied weekly by people who are keen to promote greater use of that form of software in the public sector but find that there are still barriers to it. There are also
 
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questions about the nature of the pilots, which tend to involve large companies instead of the smaller companies engaged in this field. We need to keep our eye on this very technical area.

The changes have borne fruit in the shape of £50 million in savings. If we trace that back to where it came from, we can see that it results from competition starting to emerge in a market that was previously locked down and uncompetitive. We should do everything we can to encourage that trend. Relevant to that are some important technical decisions concerning intellectual property legislation in relation to patent law and copyright law at the European Union level. Many in the sector fear that established players will use legal methods to shut out competitors and to stifle competition before it arrives by making it dependent on expensive licensing legislation. I hope that the Government will follow through the report by saying, "We are making these savings, and we could make more if we took an enlightened approach to intellectual property legislation that encouraged, rather than discouraged, a competitive market." There is plenty of action on that front, especially at EU level.

All these methods of getting more software more cheaply are useful, but I hope that they will be complemented by effective software asset management systems to ensure that we are not buying too much software. There is a fear that the mechanism could be counterproductive. If it is cheap for an organisation with 5,000 employees to buy a mass of 5,000 licences, it may be encouraged to do so, but if only 3,500 of those employees have a use for that software, the remaining 1,500 licences, although bought more cheaply, represent money down the drain. The most simple waste of all, which occurs on a weekly basis in the public sector as it does elsewhere, is to pay good money to upgrade a software product that has not even been deployed for use. I hope that we will be able to balance our pleasure at being able to buy more software more cheaply against maintaining a rigorous approach towards ensuring that we buy only what we need in the public sector.

The other report that I want to consider is the 11th report on telecommunications. My hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Mr. Rendel), who served on the Public Accounts Committee in relation to that report, made a suggestion that I promised to pass on. He believes that fixed line telephone providers could help consumers to work through the mass of call bundles that are on offer—that was one of the themes that came out of the report—by ensuring that once their call patterns have been established they are offered the most appropriate call plan. Instead of the consumer having to figure out which call plan is right, often getting it wrong and being frustrated to be told that they could have got it cheaper if only they had ticked box A instead of box B, we should encourage the telecoms companies to take some of that responsibility. That is what happened in the highly competitive mobile sphere when mobile operators responded to competition by giving commitments always to go for the lowest-priced bundle for any particular user. I hope that that idea will be considered.
 
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So far, the verdict of Ofcom, the critical player, is that companies are doing a reasonable job, but much of the report is directed towards trying to give it a steer as to how the Committee think that the competitive market can be developed. The art is to try to maintain a balance in the debate, which is taking place against a background of commercial companies fighting desperately for business. As the largest incumbent provider, BT—naturally for a business—is trying to fight off new entrants into the market. Given that most of our constituents are still BT customers, the quickest benefit for most of them usually comes from improvements to its packages for consumers. When BT announces changes to the "Together" packages or line rental, it frequently does so with a fanfare about how good they are to consumers. It is true that in the short term—today, tomorrow and next month—BT improvements are often the best way to get cheaper telecoms out to the largest number of people. However, that may make life difficult for competitors such as carrier pre-select operators, so the long-term effect is to act against competition. We need to try to strike a balance. We should not be too churlish about the goodies that are offered today, but at the same time we should not allow them to discourage us from seeking a longer-term competitive market. Ofcom has to try to hold the ring in all this.

We will know where Ofcom is going when we see the outcome of the telecoms review later in the year. We have encouraged people to go out and sell alternative telecoms packages more forcefully, but I agree with BT when it says that rogue operators often take that too far and sign up people without their consent. Events in the gas and electricity markets are already being echoed in the telecoms market. I am sure that constituents have approached hon. Members who are present to say that their suppliers have been switched but that they did not believe that they had consented to that. We must be firm and emphasise that we do not want to encourage inappropriate sales techniques and that we expect Ofcom to tackle that.

However, I am also in sympathy with alternative operators who say that it is extremely hard to describe the market as a level playing field when one operator can change at a stroke the rules of the game for everybody and introduce, for example, line rental charge changes. That alters the business model for carrier pre-select operators in a way that requires more long-term consultation and consideration. Such changes should not be thrown into the market, thus allowing people simply to sink or swim.

As always with Public Accounts Committee debates, there is plenty more to say. I shall confine myself to a final point about the tax credit system, which, again, could be the subject of a huge debate. However, I want to highlight one aspect. The technical problem with the implementation of the tax credit system is that the testing time scale was shortened so that all the tests that should have been undertaken were not carried out. When we questioned witnesses, we were told that there was an information tree. The supplier, Electronic Data Systems, told officials in the Inland Revenue that it would have to shorten the time scale for testing. It said that it thought that that would all right but that some inherent risk was entailed. It claimed that there would be no difficulty at any stage in warning people all the way
 
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up to the top—ministerial level—that problems might occur. That is an unsatisfactory method of decision making.

The solution—if one exists—to avoiding the tax credit problem would have been to take a serious political decision to delay the implementation of the system on the basis of insufficient testing. That may have been a better alternative to the method that was chosen: to go ahead without the testing. I was not satisfied that sufficient political courage existed to make such decisions.

The Child Support Agency system has already been mentioned. Again, all sorts of delays and problems have occurred with it and it is perceived that politicians declare that they will set up a system on a specific date and, when technical problems arise, there is insufficient willingness to admit that, although they want to deliver it, they cannot because of those problems. We therefore go ahead and end up with a cocked-up, discredited system. We all have constituents whose attitude to tax credits, and consequently the operation of the Inland Revenue, is negative.

I raised a tax credit query on behalf of a constituent last week. The fax from the office that deals with such queries from Members of Parliament had a space for printing a header. It stated "War room", which is perhaps not entirely suitable to be passed on to a constituent, but sums up the feeling of Inland Revenue staff that they are engaged in some sort of conflict, fending off hordes of angry Members of Parliament, who are dealing with distraught constituents. Unresolved issues about the decision-making process remain and I am sure that that applies to other matters.

The reports are useful. My time on the Public Accounts Committee has been most well spent and I commend the reports to the House.

5.8 pm

Mr. Alan Williams (Swansea, West) (Lab): I apologise to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and to the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee for being slightly late. As the Chairman knows, I had a meeting with the Comptroller and Auditor General preparatory to next week's Public Accounts Commission meeting to consider the corporate plan.

It is not generally realised that the National Audit Office is monitored as it monitors others. When we consider the list of reports on the Order Paper, I am not sure how many people realise that, on average, those value-for-money reports cost £180,000 each. The collective year's output probably costs approximately £9 million. That accounts for only a small part of the NAO's public work in auditing all the Departments. It has been argued for many years that it saves the taxpayer money because it makes eightfold savings on every public pound that it spends.

That argument had become rather axiomatic, however, and we had not challenged it. A year ago, therefore, the Commission decided to ask for an audit of the National Audit Office. Haines Watts carried it out for us, and the report arrived on my desk the other day. It confirmed what the NAO has always claimed—this was after consultation with Departments that had been studied by the NAO—which was that it did indeed save eight times its annual cost. I can think of no other
 
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organisation that can make such a claim. In fact, its efficiency is improving. Up to 1998, it saved only seven times its annual cost, so it has now improved on what was even then a remarkably good performance. The Commission now intends to ensure that we monitor annually the rate of return from the work of the NAO.

Hon. Members can see the number of reports that we have produced already this year. In the past, we have produced only 50 reports a year, so, with £650 million worth of public expenditure and income, we can only ever look at a minuscule proportion of the total. It seemed to me that, with such a good rate of return from the NAO, it would be a good investment to have more reports. For this year, therefore, my Commission has authorised an extra 10 reports. This has an advantage for the Committee, in that we do not always want to monitor those who have gone wrong; sometimes we want to monitor those who have done well and pat heads when they deserve to be patted. The extra reports will allow the Committee to have some choice over which 50 reports it will hold hearings on in the current year.

I do not pretend that we have any concept of what the optimum output of the NAO would be. With the rates of return that I have mentioned, we must ask whether even further investment might be practicable. That, however, places a further problem before the Public Accounts Committee. The more we expand the output of reports from the NAO, the more difficult it would become for us to monitor all of them and, some time in the next year or two, we might have to consider the way in which the Committee works. We have already had brief discussions about that.

Like all members of the Committee, I sometimes get very annoyed when I meet obstruction from the Departments that are being examined, and I have been particularly annoyed this year, as have other members of the Committee, about one issue. We were promised a report on the royal finances from the NAO, and a draft was put to the Committee. Its members were not satisfied that it was comprehensive, so we submitted extra questions. I myself submitted two pages, containing 20 to 30 supplementary questions. That was months ago, yet we still have not had answers to those questions from the Palace.

As some hon. Members will know, I have shown a modest interest in Palace finances over the past 12 to 15 years, so foot-dragging is not exactly unknown to me. I am amazed, however, that the Palace is treating the Public Accounts Committee with such contempt, and I hope that it will quickly make the information available to the NAO, to enable it to prepare its report. There are areas that we never look at; we are not allowed to, although we should be. The royal collection, for example, which is probably the largest single collection in the country in terms of value, is so organised—no doubt by coincidence—that the National Audit Office cannot examine it. It is organised as a charitable trust, and the NAO cannot examine charities, and its commercial wing is the Royal Collection Trust, and we have had trouble, up until Sharman, getting powers for the NAO to examine companies. It is an enormous collection, of which there is no catalogue—we were promised one 10 years ago by Sir Michael Peat, and it still does not exist. Only yesterday, I received an answer from the Financial Secretary confirming that at least she
 
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is satisfied that there is an inventory of the collection. If there is an inventory, it is a short step to producing a catalogue and making that available to the public as so many museums do. In the next couple of months, I hope that we will have the information that we require from the palace.

It is no secret that I am probably devolution's most consistent enemy in the House of Commons. I must confess, however, that I have found one merit in it. The breaking down of the auditing function between the constituent countries has increased the access of auditors to the working of Departments. Therefore, as my colleagues know, I hope that the next stage for us will be to start working co-operatively as auditing and monitoring bodies, and to produce comparative reports where appropriate. Health is an obvious example. I asked Sir John, and I think that there will be a report in the next month or two, to carry out a comparative study of hospital waiting lists in relation to hip and cataract operations. If different systems are in operation, we might as well ensure that we not only look for what is wrong but for what is best, and that we analyse the different systems, the way in which they work, and the products that they provide to the consumer. Where one part of the country has a good idea, that can be used by other parts, and where one part of the country is dragging its feet, as Wales is currently doing on health, that can be exposed.

I have nothing more to say other than to thank my colleagues. I am a PAC addict—I have been on it so long that I cannot leave it. It is so good to see new members coming on to the Committee, despite its work being difficult, numerate and time-consuming. Each report is about 70 pages, as we all know, and there is all the supplementary briefing, so when doing two of those a week, Members are probably putting in more work than on any other Committee. I congratulate my younger, newer colleagues—everyone is younger nowadays—on the enthusiasm and thoroughness with which they carried out this year's work.

5.19 pm

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