Liaison Committee Report

Margaret Hodge Excerpts

Thursday 12th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alan Beith]

I welcome my hon. Friend’s work on this as Chairman and that of his whole Committee. Clearly, almost all Governments have an in-built resistance to reform. That is a short-sighted view, however, because Governments need a civil service that can respond to the programmes that they want to carry out. The other problem that his Committee has rightly identified is that it is vital that civil servants tell the truth to power and feel enabled to do so. In our report, we identified examples where we felt that things had gone wrong because Ministers were told what they wanted to hear.

[Margaret Hodge (Barking) (Lab)]

I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on a full and important first report to the House from the Liaison Committee and, with him, endorse the importance of cross-party consensus on civil service reform if we are to ensure more effective government. Does he agree with my Committee, the Public Accounts Committee, based on the evidence we took from private contractors delivering public services, that if the Government want to see more effective and efficient delivery by those private contractors, there should be open-book accounting, the National Audit Office ought to be able to access those contractors as and when it deems it necessary, and freedom of information provision should be relevant and in place when private contractors are using taxpayers’ money to deliver public services?

[Sir Alan Beith]

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady and, of course, the Public Accounts Committee produced a number of reports that are considered in the report to which I am referring today. My Committee, the Select Committee on Justice, believes that, just as the public pound should be followed wherever it goes, the information to which the public are entitled should remain their entitlement when services are carried out by private contractors, and that contracts should be written in such as way as to ensure that that access to freedom of information is not impaired by any privatisation process.