Government Spending (Website) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. The Bill is built upon twin pillars of transparency and value for money. I hope it is uncontroversial and will commend itself to all sides of your Lordships’ House. The Government brought in the Freedom of Information Act 2000. It represents a significant advance in transparency and openness, which we believe are essential attributes of good government. There are now some practical issues about the operation of the Act, but its basic intent is openness and transparency. My Bill is a companion to it, taking openness about expenditure into the computer age. My party believes that when Governments spend money, they are spending our money. We paid the taxes, and it is our right to know what the Government are doing with them. The Government owe it to taxpayers to be transparent about how they spend money when they remove it from us by way of taxation. I am not sure that the Government share our beliefs on taxpayer accountability, but I think that we are on the same page on value for money. Governments do not like wasting money, if only because of the ever vigilant Select Committees in another place and the Comptroller and Auditor-General, both ready and willing to criticise. I shall not get into a critique of the Government’s performance on value for money over the past 10 years, because the important thing is that I am sure that there is a desire within government to achieve value for money. Transparency is a weapon in the war to win value for money, and the Bill is designed to improve transparency about government spending, thereby contributing to a climate of openness and debate. Poor value for money should have nowhere to hide. Before explaining the detailed contents of the Bill, let me set out an important premise on which it is based. The Treasury wants to achieve value for money. That is what I learnt when, many years ago, I spent two years on secondment to the Treasury, and I hope that the Minister can confirm that that remains a core value. The Bill is drafted with significant implementation powers given to the Treasury on the premise that it will want to implement it in a way that exerts the maximum pressure on spending departments to be open about their expenditure. If the Bill passes into law, it could be implemented in a minimalist way—I fully accept that. But my belief is that the Treasury will enthusiastically embrace this approach to openness. The Bill is entitled the Government Spending (Website) Bill. I had hoped that it would be called the slightly sexier Government Spending (Transparency) Bill, but I was told, politely but firmly, by our excellent Public Bill Office, which has helped me enormously with the Bill’s preparation, that ““transparency”” is a slogan, and slogans are not allowed. Clause 1(1) sets out the basic requirement that: "““The Treasury shall create, or cause to be created, a publicly searchable website containing information about expenditure by all government departments and executive agencies””." There has to be a website, it has to be publicly available, and it has to be searchable. In essence, once it is up and running, citizens can go online to find out, for example, how much the Government have spent with individual suppliers such as EDS, or on particular things, such as travel and entertainment. Subsection (2) provides that it does not apply to expenditure out of the Scottish or Welsh Consolidated Funds. That is not because transparency and value for money are unimportant in Scotland and Wales, but because they are devolved matters. I hope that if the Bill becomes law, the other Administrations will want to follow suit with their own transparency laws. Subsection (3) makes it clear that there should be no payment for access to the website because barriers to openness would be wholly inappropriate. Clause 3 gives the Treasury power to specify the content of the website and its availability. Some of this is easy, such as the hours of access. Other aspects are much more technical, such as the classification or coding systems to be used. The Treasury is clearly in the best position to determine how the database should be constructed. Clause 3(2) allows the Treasury to specify different information for different amounts of expenditure. It may be appropriate for less information to be available for amounts below a threshold of, say, £25,000. The Bill allows the Treasury to achieve maximum transparency while allowing sensible derogations. Clause 1(4) to (6) deals with the time the information is available, from 30 days after expenditure to five financial years thereafter. This is to allow comparisons to be made over time. Under Clause 1, the website applies to government departments and executive agencies, but much government money is actually spent by other bodies. For example, most of the Department of Health’s budget is spent by various NHS bodies—strategic health authorities, primary care trusts, NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts. Any examination of how the £100 billion pounds of the Department of Health budget is spent will need to follow that money through the system. Clause 2 gives the Treasury power to extend the website to public sector bodies that receive government money, but it would not require private sector companies or charities to open up their books if they get public funding. This places a proper boundary on the ability to follow public money. I am well aware that bringing other parts of the public sector within the website could raise practical issues. I have some knowledge of NHS accounting systems and it would not be an understatement to describe them as diverse. If the website is extended to the NHS, which I certainly hope it will be, it will be important for the practical issues of coding and consistency to have been addressed first. Political issues could also be at stake. Because of the way that the licence fee is structured, the BBC could be required under Clause 2 to bring its expenditure within the website. I personally think that that would be a good thing, but I recognise that it would not be without controversy and should be decided by Parliament. That is why, in Clause 8, I have made the power in Clause 2, which is to extend the website beyond government departments, subject to the affirmative procedure. The Bill contains relatively few exemptions from disclosure because it is based on the presumption of openness. The Freedom of Information Act 2000 has more exemptions but the scope of that Act goes way beyond how money has been spent and covers policy matters and details of dealings between the Government and others. For historical records of expenditure, the exemptions should be very few in number. Clause 4, however, contains important exemptions for information that would prejudice national security and related matters. Those are in line with the exemptions found in the Freedom of Information Act. Clause 5 makes it clear that the Data Protection Act 1998 is not changed by this Bill, so private information about civil servants’ salaries, for example, benefit payments or the tax affairs of individual taxpayers will remain private. Clause 6 gives the Information Commissioner an important power to examine compliance, and subsection (2) allows the relevant Secretary of State to make regulations to facilitate the use of these powers. The philosophy of the Bill is to trust the Treasury to want to implement it in a way that achieves maximum transparency and value for money. But it is also right that there is scrutiny by Parliament, so Clause 7 provides that the Treasury must prepare a report each year on the use of the website and, crucially, the effectiveness of the website in allowing public access to information about government spending. The report would be laid before both Houses of Parliament and I am sure that one or more parliamentary committees would take an interest in the way that the Bill was implemented. I express a personal hope that a committee of both Houses dedicated to the availability of information for the public could be set up, but that is a question above my pay grade. In relation to the Bill itself, I should finally mention commencement. Under Clause 9, the Act comes into force one year after it is passed. That one year is to allow the Treasury to create the website and set the detailed rules and procedures. I believe that is a reasonable timeframe for an initial website, bearing in mind that the complexities of, say, the NHS, do not have to be addressed at the outset. The Bill asks, in effect, for only a pretty basic website. Over time, I am sure that the website could be made richer in content and more sophisticated in functionality. The best can be the enemy of the good, and there is no harm in starting in a modest way. What will all this cost, and can it be done? The US Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act 2006, which is the original inspiration for my Bill, is already law in the US. The Congressional Budget Office estimated a cost of $4 million in the first year and about $15 million in total over the first four years. Surely it cannot be any more expensive to do the same thing in the UK. I do not believe that a figure of £2 million in the first year and £7.5 million over four years cannot easily and willingly be found in the Treasury’s existing budget of around £180 million a year. I have a passionate belief in the power of open and transparent information in achieving value for money. I hope that passion is shared by other noble Lords. I commend the Bill to the House. Moved, That the Bill be now read a second time.—(Baroness Noakes.)