Public Accounts Committee

David Hanson Excerpts

Thursday 16th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)]

I have sat through the debate and found it extremely positive in its approach to the issues. There is a great deal of cross-party support for making how we manage issues in government a key focus.

May I begin by paying tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge)? It is already clear that she has not only a grasp of the role of the Public Accounts Committee but the respect and support of Members on both sides of the House. It is crucial to consider the PAC’s role by leaving aside party politics and examining where systemic failures in Government expenditure occur.

May I also echo my right hon. Friend’s thanks and support for the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr Leigh)? He served the House of Commons well during his period in office, when he produced more than 400 reports on a range of issues. I can honestly say that during the last Parliament I appeared to wake up most mornings to the hon. Gentleman on the radio, kicking somebody. As a Minister in the last Government, I was often grateful that it was not me.

I welcome the approach taken in the motion. I will support it as I recognise that it contains elements that will help to strengthen the accountability of Ministers for acting upon the reports that they have accepted as recommendations from the PAC. Anything that puts in place a mechanism that will make Ministers and their civil servants know that they have to report back to the House on progress on measures that they have accepted and agreed to do is extremely important.

I am grateful for the speeches made by right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the House. Several key themes have come out of the debate. First, we have seen the importance of the scrutiny role that the PAC will perform and has performed. The hon. Member for Orpington (Joseph Johnson) pointed out the recent report on the activities undertaken by DFID.

The hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr Bacon) referred to not just scrutiny but to the positive actions taken on hospital-acquired infection as a result of reports undertaken by the PAC. Indeed, he mentioned the improvements that are taking place in the Home Office. I can speak from personal experience as for a short period I was subject to a report as a Minister in the Ministry of Justice. It was on the National Offender Management Service’s C-NOMIS programme, which is an interesting point to which I shall return later. I became a Minister three and a half years after the programme commenced, froze the project three months after my inauguration in the Department and was subject to a PAC report that considered a range of issues. Civil servants had come, gone and left before I came and, after I left, civil servants were still managing that project. There are important lessons that we need to consider.

The scrutiny role of the PAC is important, but key issues to do with good governance have arisen in today’s debate and they are equally important. The hon. Member for North East Cambridgeshire (Stephen Barclay) listed clearly what is required of good governance in any project management. It is the sort of project management that anybody in the private sector or the voluntary sector who has responsibility for resources will undertake. Even in our private lives, most of us will undertake such good governance to ensure that we meet collective objectives. The hon. Gentleman’s point was also reflected in the comments of the hon. Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price) on the leadership that is required for the role of good governance. The hon. Member for Southport (Dr Pugh) also touched on that.

Good governance relates to some key issues that were reflected in what the hon. Member for Redcar (Ian Swales) said about self-evident truths that recur. They should be the key issues that the Committee focuses on as part of its future role, and they involve simple issues such as having a proper business plan, clarity of objectives and clarity and responsibility for budgeting. It is also about having a reporting mechanism so that people know what is being spent when, how and for what purpose, and it involves the good governance of civil servants, which the hon. Member for South Norfolk mentioned, and good ministerial governance. That was reflected in the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Dr Creasy) about her constituent. Now that he has been elevated to the Lords, I am afraid that however he voted at the last general election, he will not be able to vote in the next one.

The issue is how to put in place and systemically manage the overall issues. It comes down to key issues of personal accountability for civil servants and Ministers. There is a role for the Committee, which is echoed in the motion, and it relates to the accountability of individuals—Ministers and at civil servant level—for the decisions they take and for how they manage the good governance issues I have outlined.

Delivery is key. The hon. Member for Stockton South (James Wharton), who showed real commitment to the Committee by missing his constituency party, focused on the issue in his area about how the political aspirations of whichever party is in government are delivered on the ground. What Ministers decide, how civil servants protect the taxpayer against reckless ministerial decisions and how they implement positive ministerial decisions is key. The points that the hon. Gentleman made were very important in relation to the health aspirations he discussed, but this is ultimately about value for money and making sure that whatever objectives Ministers have set are delivered in a timely, sensible and forward-looking fashion.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Mrs McGuire) highlighted some of the challenges we will face in the future. I do not want to politicise this debate, but the current Government’s focus on greater localism, devolution of power and distribution of responsibility will mean that the food chain of accountability that she mentioned will be equally important in future.

As a background to all this, we are in a time of increasingly reducing resources. The Government’s Budget proposals mean reductions of £32 billion a year and additional net tax increases of £8 billion a year by 2014-15. Departmental losses include figures such as a 49% reduction in the capital budget in the Home Office and reductions in revenue budgets of 23% and 24% at the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office. Whatever our views on those matters, and we all have our own views, it is even more important at this time of diminishing resources that they are spent with a clear focus on value for money, that they deliver what they are meant to deliver and that they are managed by Ministers through the civil service. As we have seen recently, the Committee’s reports on the Ministry of Defence’s major projects review, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking has ably led on this week, and on the private finance initiative contracts with the Highways Agency to widen the M25 show that, retrospectively, there are real issues that will be common themes that we need to address for the future.

Before I conclude, let me make a simple point about how stability relates to political accountability. I was a Minister for 12 of the 13 years of the previous Government and not once did I hold a job for more than a couple of years. I was the longest-serving Minister with responsibility for prisons and probation in the history of the Labour Government—I served for two years and one month. I had to pick up, learn about, develop and manage projects that had started before I was in the post and carried on after I left to go to the Home Office. As well as accountability for civil servants, it is important that we have accountability for Ministers. The motion would ensure that Ministers who make agreements and accept recommendations report back to the House on what they have done. I hope they will have longer in office so that they can see projects through from start to finish. They would thus remain personally accountable and, on behalf of the House, they could hold civil servants to account, too.

I commend the motion to the House, and I look forward to hearing the Minister. I thank Members on both sides of the House for their contributions.