Alignment (Clear Line of Sight) Project

George Mudie Excerpts

Monday 5th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr George Mudie (Leeds East) (Lab)]

I did not intend to speak in this debate, but I was enormously cheered by the contributions from the hon. Members for Chichester (Mr Tyrie), for Sevenoaks (Michael Fallon) and for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming). I do not know whether that is down to the new faces among us, but after 18 years in this place, I had begun to despair of achieving any sensible discussion on the scrutiny of public money. We spend other people’s money, but it had seemed to be the last thing on anybody’s mind in this place.

I do not downplay the steps that the previous Labour Government took, the framework that the Minister has inherited or his steps to put that framework into operation as quickly as he has, but my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge) put across something else very important. The proposal to put online anything over £25,000 in a budget is an enormous step forward, because we are discussing streamlining and stopping the overlap between, and the disjointed effects of, the varied financial information that covers what we spend of taxpayers’ money. I pay tribute to the Minister for that proposal.

We have to remember that we spend hundreds of billions of pounds every year. When I first came here from local government, where we knew about every line, I had the cheek to ask people in one of the Departments to break down a budget head, and I could almost hear their terror. They thought that I was very impertinent even to suggest it, and said, “It would be too expensive to give you this information.” We could take any line in the book that is in the Vote Office now—the central Government supply estimates. I picked it up this afternoon, as a geek, to go through it. There is a line referring to £1.5 billion, with a few words of explanation. If we attempt to find out what that covers and how it is broken down, we are thought to be exceeding our brief.

I listened to what was said by the hon. Members for Gainsborough (Mr Leigh), for Sevenoaks and for Chichester, who has, I think, disappeared in case he gets talked into agreeing to something. I do not think that this is pork barrel politics. It is a duty of Members in this place to know the detail of the legislation we are passing and what we are spending, but the system does not allow us to do that. There is a good argument for the Committees chaired by my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking and the hon. Member for Sevenoaks getting together, in whichever way, whether it is by taking the suggestion of the hon. Member for Sevenoaks or a combined option, with a joint Sub-Committee of the Public Accounts Committee and the Treasury Committee rather than a budget Committee. Whatever we did, it would frighten the officials. It would bring us so much power and so much ability to have a say in what we are spending if we set up an apparatus that allowed us to break all these lines down. However we do it, we need to get a system whereby we set up a group of Members who are willing to spend their time on this. That is one of the difficulties of suggesting that we have another Committee that would add to all the hours put in by members of the Treasury Committee and the Public Accounts Committee.

Two weeks ago, I made a suggestion to the new Chairman of the Treasury Committee regarding the Sub-Committee so admirably chaired by the hon. Member for Sevenoaks over the past few years. I said that we already look in outline terms at the budgets and work of the Departments and bodies covered by the Treasury Committee, but we could also run a yearly exercise whereby we took one Department and, instead of just having a two-hour session, spent the whole year going through its budget line by line, and we would do that for each Department in turn. When the Treasury Committee tried to scrutinise the work and expenditure of a Department, the people from that Department had only to see the Committee for two hours a year. They could take whatever abuse was thrown at them and bat off whatever questions they were asked, but then they knew that they were free for the rest of the year. If they knew that, on a yearly cycle, they would have line-by-line scrutiny of their Department’s budget, they might be a bit more sensible in the way they spent public money.

Some wonderful suggestions have been made, and this is wonderful new ground. We should all resolve to accept the proposals that are on the table, but we should not be satisfied in thinking that they go anywhere near to allowing us to scrutinise properly. I have one last thought. I would love to have the opportunity that the Government are taking. I do not agree with their policies, their time scale, and so on; I think I made that clear the other night. However, I do agree with the music that is coming out whereby they are forcing Departments to sit down with them and go through, as much as is possible in the time scale, the make-up of the budgets to determine whether the money is being spent sensibly. That is a wonderful step forward.