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Public Accounts

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell); he is never a feather to fall silently on water. I begin by apologising to the House for not being here at the beginning of the debate as I had a prior engagement. I gave my personal apologies to my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), and I pay tribute to his chairmanship of our Committee. I would like to put on record how much we on the Public Accounts Committee owe to the National Audit Office for the calibre of report that it puts before us. The reports are always of such high quality that it is a pleasure to work to them, although I sometimes find it rather challenging to have to read up on two separate subjects a week. I would like to touch on some common themes, not just in the reports that are before the House today which have recently been considered by the Public Accounts Committee, but in what happens once the NAO report has been published and we are yet to take evidence. One cannot help but feel that the moment an NAO report arrives in the public domain the Department it refers to goes into frenzied activity in order to try to mitigate some of the recommendations or criticisms before the permanent secretary and other officials are required to attend an evidence session. I am sure that it is just hearsay that there is a special training course for permanent secretaries who may have to appear before the Committee. During the time I have served on the Committee, I have not found any discourtesy in the treatment of civil servants, although probing questions are asked. However, there are times when the subject matter that we are dealing with reflects not so much the role of the accounting officer but the policy behind it, and often one wishes that not just civil servants but the Ministers responsible for the policy were appearing before us. Unfortunately, as the accounting officer, the permanent secretary has to account for the public expenditure. One cannot help feeling that, given the number of times in evidence we are told, ““Since the NAO report was published, we have made huge improvements””, the reports are seen as a trigger for improvement. That picks up on what Members from all parties have referred to during this debate: the need to look at how the civil service and Departments work—individually and collectively, because often there are cross-departmental issues. If the NAO has picked up on difficulties, discrepancies and lack of good use of public money, surely there should be a better mechanism in individual ministries so that they can identify much of that for themselves and address it before the NAO trigger is reached, valuable though it is—although we would not wish the Committee to be decommissioned because it was no longer seen as necessary. Ministries are reactive to the reports, and one wonders what is lacking in their structure that means that they do not pick up on such issues earlier. I would like to make some suggestions that pick up on what others have said today. Like many Members, I am occasionally invited to speak to the National School of Government, formerly known as the Civil Service College, and as a former Minister I hold the training of civil servants in our country in high esteem. I know that it is fair game to criticise the civil service, but we have one of the best civil services in the world, and its training is very good. However, somehow it has lagged behind the commercial sector in integrating core management skills into the workings of the organisation—or in this case the Department. I shall come on to the IT skills and commissioning that has been mentioned. As a member of an institute that is interested in management, I feel that Departments should improve their skills in two core areas. The first area is management information systems. It is key that such systems are considered, whether for an individual project or a strategic overview of a Ministry in carrying out its duties. People should be properly trained to ensure that information is both timely and relevant to ensuring that the Ministry works efficiently. My hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) said that he had identified a lack of accounting skills in key positions. One would have thought that that was pretty basic. If one has a work force who lack skills, one should adjust one's recruiting programme and in-service training to ensure that the skills are obtained or recruited in. As time goes by, one gets the impression that that work is not done quickly enough to tackle some of the problems that we consider in the Public Accounts Committee. The second area is project management. Outwith the IT side of things, project management should be integrated more, and the skills associated with it should be integrated into Departments. Lack of continuity has been mentioned. A long-term project is difficult to achieve when there is no continuity among the people who have to oversee it. Sometimes that cannot be avoided, but if a project has been set up properly, with a proper management system, one should be able to replace key people as it progresses without causing detriment to it. The reports from the NAO and the PAC suggest that the civil service should completely review its training and recruitment for and management of those two core functions. Some of the problems that the reports identify are persistent. Even when they are identified, it is often difficult to ensure that they are corrected in a timely manner. Although there are several examples, I shall refer to the single payment scheme, about which our report states that, although most farmers are being paid earlier than they were in 2005, ““errors persist””, and that the Government run the risk of being fined hundreds of millions of pounds. One would think that every warning bell in the Ministry would ring at that. Apart from the practicalities of getting the scheme right, the Ministry was heading down a road that would leave the British taxpayer culpable for such a fine. That should have been picked up early. If proper project management had been applied to the scheme, the problems might have been avoided. The does not apply only to the single payment scheme—there have been persistent problems with tax credits and pay-as-you-earn.