Budget Responsibility and National Audit Bill [HL]

My Lords, I support the government amendments to introduce an external review. The debate in Committee and, to an extent, at Second Reading demonstrated why that was a good idea. As for whether three years or five makes better sense, I have a lot of sympathy with what the noble Lord, Lord Burns, said about the benefits of five years. The amendment is very flexible. It does not say that the review will be commenced on 1 October five years hence. It says that at any point a review can be undertaken; as soon as the non-execs were appointed, they could cause a review to be undertaken if they were worried ab initio that the office was not performing well. If they then felt that it carried on causing them concern, they could have another review relatively quickly. The draft gives the non-execs a lot of flexibility. What we are doing here is a belt-and-braces job. On the assumption that the office is doing a reasonable job, and bearing in mind that it will be subject to a huge amount of external scrutiny—this body is not operating in the closet with no one looking at what it is doing; every time it produces a report, 50 economists mark it—to do that roughly once a Parliament sounds about right.