Letter from the
Chair of the Committee to the Secretary of State dated 14 September
2010
Thank you for your letter of 26 July concerning the
proposed restructuring of the Department for Transport's main
estimates. My Committee is also grateful to have received your
department's Estimate for 2010-11 and the associated memorandum.
This letter deals with both matters.
We welcome the steps you are taking to make the department's
main estimate more informative, particularly as you are seeking
to go beyond what is required by the Clear Line of Sight programme.
We are also grateful that committee staff and the House of Commons
Scrutiny Unit were involved in discussing your proposals. Improving
the information provided to Parliament about transport spending
will help us scrutinise your department's work more effectively,
benefitting the department as well as Parliament and the public.
We are content with the proposed new budget headings,
although it would be helpful if you could explain what the "Smarter
Travel" heading will cover. A footnote in the main estimate
could usefully clarify the meaning of this phrase when the 2011-12
Estimate is published. We would also be interested to know where
expenditure on bus services falls under the five priority areas
for the department set out in your letter.
Our main concern is to ensure that we will be able
to compare spending proposals for 2011-12 with the 2010-11 outturn.
We would appreciate the inclusion of a detailed analysis in the
2011-12 Estimate memorandum, perhaps by listing programmes under
each of the budget headings so a comparison between 2010-11 and
2011-12 can easily be made. This will be particularly useful in
relation to existing cross-cutting budget headings, such as "integrated
transport", which presumably will be split across several
new headings.
We would hope that the estimate structure agreed
for 2011-12 could be retained throughout the period covered by
the 2010 spending review and that when changes are made in future
sufficient information is provided to Parliament to enable comparisons
to be made between spending plans from year to year.
It has also been difficult to compare the data published
in estimates with information included in the department's annual
report. In our view, the expenditure reported in the annual report
should be based on the budget headings used in the estimate, so
that comparisons between budget and outturn can be made. We would
be grateful for your assurance that this will be done from now
on.
Turning to the 2010-11 Estimate, our only query concerns
the substantial increase in resource provision for Annually Managed
Expenditure by the Highways Agency (Part II, line X, page 119).
Once Clear Line of Sight changes are taken into account this budget
heading increases by some £500 million but the memorandum
does not provide an adequate explanation of why this is being
done. We would be grateful if you could provide the reasons for
this increase.
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