Budget Responsibility and National Audit Bill [HL]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Barnett, has gone a bit over the top in describing Mr Chote and his colleagues as being ““used””. The Statement made by my right honourable friend the Chancellor, to which the noble Lord referred, spoke of an audit of the annual managed expenditure savings. It was not an audit of anything other than one part of the totality of the package that my right honourable friend announced last month. The noble Lord has extrapolated from a relatively small use of the word ““audit”” into something much bigger that is not justified. I agree, in a sense, that people such as myself, my noble friend the Minister and the noble Lord, Lord Barnett, who have an accounting background, tend to think that the term ““audit”” is reserved for this statutory audit function, has a very specific meaning and applies only to the audit of financial statements. However, the term means only ““independent examination””, and in that sense I do not see any reason why the figure should not be used. However, I say to the noble Lord that even when considering the audit of annual financial statements, those statements contain loads of assumptions and forecasts. To do an impairment review, you have to forecast cash flows for 10 years and choose discount rates and things such as that to calculate the figure that you put on your balance sheet. For your pension liabilities, you have to do even more complex calculations involving even more assumptions about the future. So even ““audit”” has to deal with these difficult areas of future estimation, even within the concept of statutory audit. It would be helpful if the Treasury were to be reminded that the term ““audit”” has a rather technical meaning; it would be better to say something like ““has independently examined””. Perhaps the Minister could take back to the Treasury that its lexicon could have that amendment added. I come back to my basic point, though, that the noble Lord, Lord Barnett, has gone a little over the top on this amendment.