Public Accounts

It is an enormous pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay). As a former retailer, I assure the House that the hon. Gentleman is not mad. Thurrock is one of the UK's top 20 retail centres and for it not to be regarded as such by bureaucrats shows how out of touch they are with the reality of the commercial world. I have served on the Committee with pleasure for the past 18 months and most of my remarks will address how relevant our work is to the world of Government today, rather than focusing on one of the problems identified at our previous opportunity to debate the work of the Committee, which was how often we look back with excessive hindsight at administrative failings. Too much distance makes things less relevant both to our constituents and when making improvements for the future. In some cases, as I will explain, we are highly topical and relevant. It is essential for the accountability of the Executive that we have a body such as the Public Accounts Committee to provide accountability to the legislature, and that is the role that we fulfil. Without wanting to pat myself and my colleagues on the back too much for being one of the more diligent Committees in the House in the work that we—supported by the National Audit Office—undertake, that diligence is shown by the number of reports that we have before us for consideration. The vast majority of our reports tend to be connected with events that occurred at some point in the past, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) illustrated in relation to the single farm payments case, some of which took place a number of years ago. During the period under review, we also reviewed the Icelandic trawlermen's compensation arrangements, which meant going back not just years but decades to arrangements that were put in place in the 1970s. Having said that, some of the reports were still topical while we were dealing with them—for example, the 55th report of the 2006-07 Session, ““The Delays in Administering the 2005 Single Payment Scheme in England””, which was published in September 2007. We reviewed the report with the NAO after we had eventually managed to persuade the former chief executive, Mr. McNeill, to come before the Committee. We had a session in June 2007 at which point there were beneficiaries of the payment scheme who had still not been paid the moneys from 2005 to which they were entitled. Although that applied to a relatively small number of people, and in most cases related to farms that had gone into probate, it was still causing considerable anguish among the people who were entitled to the payments. We encouraged the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to bring forward payments for the subsequent years of 2006 and 2007, and now of course 2008, in order to learn the lessons of the failures of the past and to try to ensure that payments were made in a much more timely fashion. I called on DEFRA's permanent secretary to give an undertaking that payments for 2008 should be made within that calendar year. DEFRA will have had more than three years to put this fiasco right, and we are talking about a relatively small number of claimants—118,000 at the time of the report; I think that the number goes down slightly each year instead of going up. In terms of the scale of administration of support schemes, this one is relatively small, and most of the challenges of putting it in place should have been ironed out by now. We will await with interest how it gets on in relation to 2007 and the current year. My second example of a report that had considerable topicality when we were working on it is the fourth report of the 2007-08 Session—““Environment Agency: Building and maintaining river and coastal flood defences in England””. We met to consider the NAO report in the week after the first of the dramatic floods had occurred last June. We therefore had the opportunity to quiz the chief executive of the Environment Agency about what it had been doing in the interval between that hearing and the previous occasion five years earlier when she appeared before the predecessor Committee. It was most revealing to establish that although the agency had then committed to produce a flood management action plan for each of the 67 separate river catchments, by April 2007 only four of those had been completed, one of which happened to cover the area that I represent. Ludlow is within the catchment of the upper Severn river basin, where we had suffered very significant flood damage, if not as bad as some of the damage in the areas around Hull. More than 300 houses were flooded and a bridge on one of the main arterial routes into the town of Ludlow was swept away. That bridge was not even identified as being at risk under any of the categories in the flood management defence plan, which the Environment Agency proudly claimed that they had completed for our area. That throws into question the value of such plans if they do not even pick up significant infrastructure elements such as a road bridge. Our Committee was able to highlight, almost contemporaneously, some important aspects of Departments' administration. That shows its significance. We are not only occasionally topical or contemporaneous but increasingly forward looking. I shall cite two examples of that. We have begun a scrutiny role for the spending on one of the largest public infrastructure projects that the country is undertaking—the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics. I am vice-chairman of the all-party London 2012 group, the chairman of which is a former member of the PAC, the hon. Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Derek Wyatt), who was mentioned earlier. He held a conference today to update Members of Parliament and other interested parties on progress. I support the games, but our Committee has the opportunity to scrutinise the spending to an extent that is not otherwise available to the public. We intend to do so on a basis that, we hope, will allow the games to be delivered on time and on the new, revised and much increased budget, as opposed to looking back in several years to ascertain whether they were delivered on time and on budget. That would not be much use to anyone because we I cannot imagine that we will host another Olympic games in my lifetime. The Committee therefore fulfils a valuable role and we are looking forward to seeing progress every year. It was apparent from our first session, which was held last November, that the information provided to the Olympic Board was perhaps not as full as it might have been. When we next consider the matter, it will be intriguing to learn how much more financial information has been made available. The financial information that the Olympic Delivery Authority reported to its accountable body—the Olympic Board—could be included on less than two sides of a sheet of A4. For a project of more than £9 billion, that seems a little light. I hope that the most recently appointed member to the board, following the local elections, can bring his forensic eye for detail to its deliberations and that Mayor Boris Johnson will insist on much more vigorous financial information and scrutiny of spending, as, indeed, we will. The second more or less contemporary role that the Committee has undertaken in the past six months is that of shedding some light on the single largest potential security breach, which did so much to undermine confidence in the Administration's competence—the loss of data held by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. Given that the loss occurred during transmission of data from Revenue and Customs to the NAO, our Committee was quite properly briefed by the Comptroller and Auditor General in a session last December. As a result of that session and our ability to question one side of the transfer, by asking the Comptroller and Auditor General I secured the exchange of e-mails between Revenue and Customs and the NAO, which explained what information was being sought, the manner in which delivery was requested and the individual titles of those in Revenue and Customs who had been copied into the correspondence. Without that, we would have been left with only the Chancellor's statement, which shed little light at all on the detail of what transpired. I believe that it was a result of that session—in addition to the work of many hon. Members, particularly those on my Front Bench—that the Government were persuaded to appoint Mr. Kieran Poynter of PricewaterhouseCoopers to undertake a detailed review of what had happened. We have had the first part of that report, but we are eagerly awaiting the second stage to see whether it provides any further illumination on what happened, and whether Government procedures for information, transmission and management of personal information will be improved. Let us hope that the lesson learned from this sorry affair means that better procedures are put in place, which Ministers assure us will be the case. I do not intend to go through the work that we have done on other reports because they have been adequately covered by other Committee members, but I would like to conclude by saying that the Committee is a pleasure to work on. It has been a great privilege to have the opportunity to work with Sir John Bourn during the final year or so of his tenure, and I would like to join other hon. Members in wishing him well in his retirement.