Work of the Public Accounts Committee - House of Commons - 29 January 2003

Speech delivered on Wed 29th Jan 2003

2.54 pm

Mr. David Rendel (Newbury): It is always a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams), who is, as all its members know, one of the Public Accounts Committee's most effective members. It is always a pleasure to see him come in, often at the end of our hearings, to address the witnesses with that delightful smile on his face. It is so disarming as far as the witnesses are concerned, but we all know that it is the smile on the face of the tiger. His bite is always worse than one expects, and it is certainly effective.

I pay tribute to our Chairman, who has proved to be very effective and has done a great job since the last election. I am delighted that we are working closely across all three parties with him.

The Committee has been expanded so that, for the first time, a colleague from the Liberal Democrat party has been appointed to it. Sadly, however, my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Mr. Jones) has been unable to with us much as he became rather ill shortly after his appointment. I am sure that we would all want to wish him a swift return to the Committee when his health recovers.

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I pay tribute to Nick Wright, our new Clerk, who has had just over a year in office and has proved to be as effective as his predecessor, Ken Brown. It is a delight to work with him and his staff, and they always give us a very good service, as of course do the staff of the National Audit Office, who are invariably patient with all our demands, however insensitive they may be.

The right hon. Member for Swansea, West was absolutely right to say that this is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful, and effective Committees of the House. It is a delight to serve on it. I am surprised that some of my fellow Opposition Members and some Government Back Benchers have not yet recognised its effectiveness. It is fun to serve on it and to feel that, once in a while, even as an Opposition Member, one can have real influence over the workings of, if not Parliament, the country as a whole and the way in which civil servants work to make Departments more effective.

I should like to speak about a few of the Committee's reports in order to bring some matters to the attention of the House. One report was on obesity. It was the first time that a collection of senior civil servants from a wide variety of Departments—permanent secretaries, accounting officers and others—had appeared before us. If I remember rightly, there were five witnesses, all of whom held senior office. It was fascinating to see some cross-departmental working—so-called joined-up government—and to have a chance to do some joined-up work in the Committee by asking questions of permanent secretaries and others. It also gave me the chance to get on to one of my hobby-horses—cycling—and to mention that cycling and walking reduce the problems of obesity, which are—dare I say it?—growing.

A report on the Victoria and Albert Museum made it clear that the imposition of charges had been a major reason for the drop in visitor numbers. I am delighted that charges have now been removed, as a result of which the figures have risen very quickly. I like to think that that fact, combined with our report on what went wrong after charging was introduced, means that charging to enter our museums will never be reintroduced.

Another report was on oil pollution at sea. That gave me a chance to use, as members of the Committee often do, some of my experience as someone who worked for a while in the oil industry and therefore knew a little about it. I asked the witnesses whether oil transported by pipeline or oil transported by ship was most likely to lead to pollution. It became apparent that oil companies, which decide whether to construct a pipeline to a new oilfield purely on cost grounds, had done no real research into whether the cheaper solution in terms of their costs of moving oil to and from an oilfield was also cheaper in terms of the long-term costs of pollution. The witnesses agreed that research into which of the two was more likely to lead to pollution would be a good thing. I hope that the Government will try to ensure that it is conducted.

We had an interesting hearing on the Post Office. Some of us with rural constituencies made the important point that rural areas are suffering from a drop in the number of post offices. Small post offices are often the heart and soul of small rural villages; often, when such a post office closes the village dies. The maintenance of

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those post offices is therefore very important to us. It became clear that the threat to rural post offices and to the Post Office in general is likely to grow as competition is introduced. I like to think that it is partly as a result of that hearing that the extent to which and speed at which competition was introduced was somewhat reduced.

It became clear that what has really gone wrong with the Post Office is that it has made very large profits over a long period, all of which have been siphoned into the general Government coffers and not reinvested in technology and services. If the Post Office had made such investments, it might still be making some of those profits and would not be in its current state.

We had an interesting investigation into income tax and the Inland Revenue. The Chairman of the Committee said that people should be encouraged, as much as possible, to submit their income tax returns online. However, he did not mention the ironic fact that Members of Parliament are among the few employees, wage earners or whatever who are unable so to submit their income tax returns online because the special parliamentary form that we must use is not yet available online. If the Treasury wants to set a good example, perhaps it could ensure that something is done to correct that.

I was able to make a bit of fun of the Inland Revenue on that occasion by pointing out that it sends out bills for £0.00 to those who have been fined for sending in their forms late when they do not in fact owe any tax. In subsequent parliamentary questions, the Treasury replied that it was important to send out those bills to warn people that they were late sending in their forms, even if no payment was implied. That merely brings the Inland Revenue into disrepute. I hope that the Treasury will think again about whether that is really the best way to approach Inland Revenue taxpayers.

We also had a hearing on clinical negligence in the health service. One of the issues that was discussed was whether we should move towards a no fault, no blame compensation system, on which I have been keen for a long time. I should explain, as I often have to in our hearings, that I have a direct interest in the health service in that my wife is a general practitioner. There is no question about the amount of concern and distress in the health service as a result of people worrying about being taken to court for decisions made, often in very good faith, but nevertheless in error. Medicine is not a science but an art, and it is often difficult to make the right decision. The fact that people do not always make the right decision should not necessarily lead to their being taken at great length, often over many years, through the courts, with all the stress that that adds to them in doing their jobs. I am sure that that is one of the reasons for people wishing to take early retirement, which is leading to some of the health service's staffing problems. A great deal of stress arises from the difficulties that people get into when they are taken through the courts. We also discovered that the amount of money that is spent on lawyers in many negligence claims is more than the victim of the negligence ever receives. The whole system is a way of putting a lot of money into the pockets of lawyers rather than into those of victims, which is not a good way of spending public money.

The private finance initiative was a much-discussed subject, often as a result of individual cases that came before us. Several issues have been common to many of

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our hearings. First, competition is likely to reduce gradually for PFI schemes, not least because of debt refinancing, which the Chairman mentioned. As we get better at demanding back for the public sector some of the savings that are achieved through debt refinancing, PFI schemes will become less attractive for the private sector. There is a danger, which one or two cases have shown, of few companies competing for PFI contracts. When we reach the stage at which the level of competition is so low, the value of PFI is likely to reduce and it will become more difficult to judge whether such a contract is good value for money when compared with the public sector.

On several occasions, some of us have been worried about the way in which the public sector comparator was calculated. We sometimes wondered whether the figures were fudged to show that the private sector contractor offered better value when, had the figures been calculated differently, the result would not have been so clearly in favour of the private sector.

Many of us have been worried about risk transfer. Often, the risk has not been properly transferred in the expected way. Consequently, the value of the PFI contract has been much less than it was believed to be. The public sector has frequently had to bail out a private sector contractor. In practice, the risk has remained with the public sector, which is no great surprise. The major public services that our Government run simply cannot be allowed to go to the wall. One cannot put out a major health service operation to the private sector so that there is nowhere to treat patients if it goes bankrupt. The public sector must keep the facility going. Genuine risk transfer is difficult in major, important public services.

A further point recently came to light. It has not formed part of our hearings so far but I hope that it may do so in future. There is a growing worry that many major contractors who win PFI contracts transfer large parts of the debt to special purpose vehicles, which are subsidiaries of the main contractor. They may be hiding the extent to which they are getting into debt and putting their operations at risk. We may have to take that up in the Committee. It is not direct fraud, but it hides from the public sector the danger that some of our PFI contracts could pose.

The point is worryingly mirrored by the Government's tendency to treat some of their liabilities as off balance book by trying to ensure that genuine Government liabilities in some privatised contracts are hidden off balance sheet and do not count towards the public sector borrowing requirement. Further questions will have to be asked about where the debt lies, especially in relation to, for example, privatisation of the National Air Traffic Services or the tube.

We had some fun with our investigation of pipes and wires. Controlling the number of holes that are dug in our roads is a subject of enormous public interest. Everybody experiences the congestion that roadworks cause. There is a case for telling regulators that they should insist on private utilities ensuring that they use the same hole in the road and do not dig up the road several times in quick succession. That maddens many members of the public.

I want to consider three reports that have particular topical significance. Prisoners and prisoners who reoffend have featured in the press recently. It became

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clear when we talked to the head of the Prison Service that, if we want to reduce crime, the worst thing that we can do is imprison people for a short time. One of the most likely methods of causing reoffending is to give sentences that are too short to provide the education that prisoners need and could mean that they lead a life free of crime.

The point is difficult to get across to the public, who tend to believe that the best thing to do with prisoners is to lock 'em away for as long as possible and throw away the key. If we want to ensure that a prisoner does not reoffend, and if we are interested not in retribution but in securing the minimum number of victims in future, it is important not to put people in prison for a short time, after which they are more likely to commit more crimes. That happens all too often.

There is a strong case for investing much more money in prison education. When Mr. Narey, director general of the Prison Service, came before us, he said that the return from investment "would be dramatic". He stated: "I do not believe I am doing much more than playing at the edges".

That makes a strong case for the "spend to save" budget—another subject that we considered recently. Spending a little more on educating our prisoners would give them a chance of leaving prison not for a life of more crime but a useful life in the community.

We could spend a little more on such education now. The report states: "The Prison Service said that the single action most likely to impact on reoffending was investment in education to enable prisoners to obtain jobs on release."

As I said earlier, that is a difficult view to present to the public. It is easy to follow the tabloid route of claiming that the best thing to do with those who have committed crimes is to shut them away for a long time. However, the worst thing that we can do is to put them away for a short time and leave them to learn more about how to commit crimes in future.

Combat identification is the second especially topical subject that I want to consider. It is topical because of the severe threat of war with Iraq. The war already has comparatively little public support. Many people believe that we should not even consider going to war in Iraq. If many of our troops are killed by friendly fire or many enemy civilians are killed by our fire, public support for a war is likely to reduce. That was apparent in recent conflicts. For example, in Kosovo, the deaths of innocent civilians constituted a major reason for some people's belief that it was not sensible for us to be there.

Mr. Alan Williams: The National Audit Office report made it clear that friendly fire is not a new occurrence and that it has been part of warfare for a long time. One can understand that, on the ground in close battle, friendly fire causes a high proportion of deaths; it is not a new experience. That does not mean that we do not want to stop it, but the hon. Gentleman might inadvertently have given the wrong impression that it was a recent phenomenon.

Mr. Rendel: I accept the right hon. Gentleman's point that it is by no means a new experience. However, the

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extent to which civilians are in danger in modern warfare is new. When armies met on a battlefield in Europe in the middle ages, that was different.

Madam Deputy Speaker (Sylvia Heal): Order. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will not continue with that point for long.

Mr. Rendel: I shall not wander into the middle ages any longer, but one of our reports made the specific point that we should consider whether our armed forces need to pay more attention to the possibility of identifying the difference between enemy forces and enemy civilians.

It struck me as rather odd that the witnesses who came before us on that occasion did not seem to recognise that it was an important point. They seemed to think that the only important point was to identify our forces from the enemy forces, and they had not taken into account the important psychological effects of modern warfare—not just on our armed forces, but also on our civilians back here in this country—and how important it is, if we are to fight a modern war, to have the support of the public behind our armed forces, which they could lose if we do not pay proper attention to this question.

I turn now to what is my own specialist subject, in so far as I have one in this House: higher education and widening participation in it. As the Chairman mentioned, that is another matter of important topical interest.

The NAO report confirmed that people from poorer backgrounds are already significantly less likely than others to participate in higher education. The previous Secretary of State and the current Minister for Higher Education have both confirmed over time on different occasions that the fear of debt is one of the main reasons why young people are being put off going to university.

A report from Universities UK, the joint vice-chancellors' body, is, I believe, to come out in a few weeks' time. Baroness Warwick, chief executive of Universities UK, announced some of its findings to a conference that I attended just the other day. She pointed out that about 84 per cent. of the group of young people that it surveyed who were thinking of going to university—they were either in further education colleges or sixth forms—said that they were concerned about the levels of debt, which were among the problems deterring them from possibly going to university. It also found that 15 per cent. of these young people had decided that they would not go to university, and that 50 or 60 per cent. of them had decided not to go because of the fear of debt.

The Government are rightly determined to get more of those young people who can benefit from university education to do so. They are rightly concerned to widen participation in that sense. As we all accept, widening participation means widening participation particularly among the less well-off sections of our population, those who perhaps do not come from families that traditionally have gone to university.

If we are to achieve that wider participation, it is absolutely clear that we must reduce the fear of debt. Indeed, it was the Prime Minister's recognition of that fact that led to his announcement in his famous

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conference speech immediately after the last election that he would set up the review of higher education financing, and of student financing in particular. The present situation is therefore somewhat ironic. The Prime Minister having decided upon that, because he knew the problems the matter had caused for Labour party candidates on the doorstep in the previous election, as a result of the perception of the debt and the fear of debt at the levels it was then, after the introduction of tuition fees, we now find that as a result of that review the fear of debt will be much greater. Indeed, the debts that students end up with will be much greater.

There is possibly a need for a further National Audit Office investigation of how we have reached this point. The Government knew that they had a major problem over widening participation among less well-to-do families. They set up a review to answer it and ended up with proposals that will make the problem far worse. If that is not some error in the way in which the Government work, I do not know when in the time that I have been on the PAC I have seen a worse case.

3.19 pm