My Lords, I intervene briefly to say that I support the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Crisp. We are grateful to him for tabling them, and indeed for presenting them so very well.
I also rather enjoyed the opportunity from the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, to think back to 2011, as I think it was, when I went to visit Watford General—I probably announced a new hospital then, but I cannot quite remember. She said the local connections were all funded by the local authority, and I seem to remember paying for the roundabout outside Watford General Hospital, because it was so instrumental to the process of the redevelopment. Anyway, that is by the way.
What I am really looking for from my noble friend on the Front Bench is to understand the mischief to which the Government’s proposals in Clause 54 are the remedy. Certainly, when I was Secretary of State—which is a long way back; we were not in deficit but we did not have a lot of money—the issue every year with the capital expenditure of FTs was that they always told us that they were going to spend a lot and then did not spend anything like as much. To account for that in the public accounting system, we had to make some heroic assumptions about how much less they would spend than they said they were going to spend.
It may be that the department is saying that the way we get round all this is to set very tight limits in the first place—to say where we think they are going and what we think they can spend. This, frankly, is a recipe for disaster for many trusts, because the reason they underspend is that there are so many difficulties in planning and executing capital expenditure projects.
I am trying to find out the purpose behind the Government taking such strong powers in relation to capital expenditure. I rather hope that they might see merit in the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Crisp.