Public Accounts

Not only will I do so, but I am nearly finished. I have the reports with me to try to ensure that I stay strictly on the rails. The Thames Gateway report was also interesting for the wider issues that it raised. I quote very briefly from paragraph 13, where we said:"““The Department's overall management of the programme has been weak. It is yet to establish arrangements for controlling the programme such as a budget, implementation plan, joint risk management, appropriate financial incentives, a performance management framework for delivery partners, public reporting on progress, and measurable performance indicators.””" Those are among the most basic things that we would expect anyone who manages a large Department, agency or project to have taken on board from the start, but to have managed to spend £670 million without doing any of them takes some doing. I hope that the Treasury is not only on the case, but involved in allied areas where similar management failings may have arisen. I want briefly to turn to the private finance initiative, because the figures published in the appendix of our report on tendering and benchmarking show that, when the whole stream of payments going forward is added up, the total liability that now faces the public purse is £170 billion. Of course, the Treasury was anxious to point out—Mr. John Kingman wrote to the Committee to make this clear—that, in doing so, one is adding future and non-comparable figures to present figures without applying any appropriate adjustment and that aggregating the stream of future payments gives a net present value of £91 billion. In complaining that he did not like giving us the £170 billion figure, Mr. Kingman said:"““It is rather as if we were adding a figure in £ to one in $, without converting the currencies, and ending up with one that is not denominated in any currency at all. I am obviously uncomfortable providing the Committee with a figure which is meaningless””." That takes the prize for being unnecessarily complicated and almost guilty of sophistry, because £170 billion is a fairly easily understandable number. It is fairly obviously true that £170 billion in 35 years' time will not be the same as £170 billion today—we can all understand that—and that the two factors that must be taken into account to get from one number to the other are time and interest rates; quite where foreign currencies come into it I do not know. I can only assume that Mr. Kingman, whom I know to be a very bright man, is guilty of having a trait to which many bright civil servants sometimes fall prey: an attraction to complexity. The hon. Member for Great Grimsby said that the Rural Payments Agency chose the most complex scheme available, the dynamic hybrid. Quite why it had to choose that scheme I do not know. The Germans chose the dynamic hybrid, too, but they managed to make it work. We did not. I fear—this is probably a subject for a book—that one of the problems facing our public sector, and affecting the way in which our senior civil service conducts itself and advises Ministers, is that senior civil servants are attracted to complexity like moths to a bright light. We need a bit of simplicity. We need to concentrate on basics, including having a budget for a project, making sure that there is an implementation plan, and ensuring that the delivery partners know what on earth the project is supposed to do. If we get back to that, we will have a greater chance of ensuring decent taxpayer value for the expenditure for which Parliament votes.