Public Bodies: Governance and Accountability

Alex Mayer Excerpts

Wednesday 12th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[Alex Mayer (Dunstable and Leighton Buzzard) (Lab)]

My concern is about interim officers in local government, and CEOs who pop up in one place and then pop up somewhere else a couple of months after they have resigned. What safeguards are in place to ensure that negative behaviours or actions in one organisation do not appear in another where the same individual is involved?

[Anna Turley]

My hon. Friend raises an interesting and important issue. Far too often there have been departmental silos, and silos within other public bodies, and they are not talking to each other. As she says, people can bounce around, failing upwards, and far too often there have not been channels of accountability and scrutiny to enable us to look at and manage performance. As part of our broader approach to public service reform, we are keen to look not just at how we manage recruitment, retention, training, accountability and performance within the civil service, but at how we ensure that people in the broader public sector are not failing upwards and are accountable to those they should be accountable to. I thank her for raising that.

To further raise the bar on accountability, we are committed to the continuous improvement of day-to-day checks and balances. A sponsorship code has been available since 2022, but we will look at it in the light of the arm’s length body review. Arm’s length bodies are also consistently reviewed through long-established lines of accountability, and through their boards and sponsoring Departments. Those boards scrutinise the arm’s length body’s executive decision making and oversee compliance with statutory and non-statutory guidance issued by the Government. Again, though, we will look at all those levels of compliance and accountability to ensure that they are fit for purpose.

As my right hon. and hon. Friends have said, the public are impatient to see the change they voted for. They want it to become a reality. For them, it is not an abstract question of public service reform; it is about whether their local station has a lift to make it accessible, or where a school is built.

The Leather Museum that my right hon. Friend the Member for Walsall and Bloxwich mentioned sounds fantastic—a significant local and national asset that deserves to be recognised and supported. I urge her to continue her doughty campaign, along with Linda, Adam and Lauren, who sound as though they are doing a fantastic job. That museum deserves to have a bright future and I know she will do all she can to make that happen. I hope the Government will support her in that.

At a time when people are impatient to see change, I want to assure everybody that the Government are committed to transforming accountability across our arm’s length bodies.