Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Tuesday 9th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, for more than three or four decades I have had the pleasure of speaking either before or after the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton. Sometimes we sing from the same hymn sheet. In the spring of last year, I think that we both asked the same question about non-departmental public bodies at the same time.

I am confused, and even more confused today, as I cannot work out why we have more people speaking on this topic than we have in the defence debate on Friday. I thought that maybe it has something to do with money, so I asked myself, “What are we talking about?”. We are talking about 21 government departments, employing 528,000 civil servants, responsible for 192 non-departmental public bodies. The word “quango” was dispensed with many years ago; some of us tried to get rid of the “q” when we chaired various bodies that became autonomous non-governmental organisations, which probably would have been the secret for most of them.

Those 192 non-departmental public bodies employ about 111,000 people and they have around 18,000 appointees. The figures are difficult to determine, but they spend approximately £46 billion a year. To put that into context, the defence budget is £32 billion a year and the health budget is £105 billion a year. Here is £46 billion of public money going somewhere and the question is where, for what, how and why. I should explain that in the past I chaired one or two bodies in this field, but we had the great advantage that many of them were created to bring in unpaid people from the private sector who served for free without large amounts of bureaucracy.

Now that the change has come, no one is quite sure what these bodies are and what they do. I thought that the best thing to do would be to start asking Parliamentary Questions, which I did in 1999, with the objective of determining which Members of the House of Lords served on these bodies, because that would provide additional expertise to your Lordships’ House. What then happened was a sort of collapse of stout parties. It was normally, with noble Lords opposite in power, that, with regret, they did not know the answers. Instead of trying to find the answers, they would give the standard reply: “The information is not centrally available”, or, “To get that information would be too costly”. They could not answer at all. I asked again and again—a total of 55 Questions.

I have a roll of honour here of those to whom I asked those Questions who gave the most unsatisfactory Answers—beyond 11-plus: the noble Baroness, Lady Royall of Blaisdon, the noble Lord, Lord Malloch-Brown, the noble Baroness, Lady Vadera, the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath—he was twice on the list, actually—the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, the noble Lords, Lord Young of Norwood Green, Lord McKenzie of Luton, Lord Myners and Lord Patel, the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, the noble Lord, Lord Carter, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, again, and the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. They all answered almost exactly the same: “The information is not centrally available”. I used to go to get that information and then ask the Question, and they gave the same Answer back. In later months, we had the charming noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, who, when I asked her the Question, gave the same Answer but had the decency to ask me out for tea, but I was worried that I might be corrupted, so I think that I paid for tea in the end, but she had great charm.

Then on to the scene came the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach. Do you know, my Lords, he caught the same disease? He said, “The information is not centrally available”, or whatever. He wrote one of the naive, even less than 11-plus Answers, and I wrote him a rather nice charming letter—or a nasty charming letter—saying that he did not know what he was talking about.

Before we debate the subject, we should know what we are talking about. Your Lordships will know that the annual NDPB report that has just been issued for the period ending March 2009 is way out of date, so the figures in it make no sense whatsoever. At the moment, it seems that we are debating without any knowledge or understanding with Ministers who have no clue what their departments have been or should be doing. Perhaps we just need one simple report that updates the current figures. We had the figure of £43 billion in 2008-09 and we have gone up to £46 billion. We have had 11,000 more employees in that period. If we get it up to date—why can it not come up to right now?—on what all these bodies are, we might get somewhere.

In the anticipation that we might have a Conservative Government, naturally, I wrote to David Cameron last year and sent in the same sort of questions. He passed this on to Francis Maude and said that he would be in touch with me. Neither of them has been in touch with me. I have reason to believe that I probably have more information on these bodies than anyone else on the planet.

I could suggest that rather than having another ango—or something like that—the Government should just say to me, “Malcolm Selsdon, can you put the Act together?”. I believe that I could, because the civil servants themselves know the answers. The difficulty here is that there is a mutual protection society that wants none of them to be abolished.

The first question to which I would still like to know the answer is: how many Members of your Lordships’ House serve on these bodies? I then put the question, “And what is the remuneration?”. That was not to try to say that they were being funded illegally or overpaid in some way or another; it was to demonstrate that being on those bodies provides extra knowledge for this House. As I analyse those within the House who have served or serve on NDPBs, I think that we probably have enough expertise to put together a reasonable report. So why do we not set a date, that within 14 or 20 days from today we will have a report and then reconvene? I think that it would make a lot of sense.