Budget Responsibility and National Audit Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Oakeshott of Seagrove Bay and Lord Higgins

Monday 29th November 2010 Grand Committee

[Lord Oakeshott of Seagrove Bay]

I am glad that we are starting to get the matter addressed, but this is Committee stage and it is no good, if I may say so, taking a Civil Service attitude of, “We’ll think about anything that comes in”. This is Committee stage. I have made a proposal and suggested the document should be shorter, not longer. I know that it is a draft. I have said that, if the Minister cannot explain why intergenerational is the one bit of fairness that is picked out, why not leave out “intergenerational” and just say “fairness”? Could we actually engage here, please? What is the answer?

[Lord Higgins]

Before my noble friend replies to that, perhaps I may delay the Committee for a moment or two more. First, I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell. His reference in the amendment to the lines in the Bill is correct. I was working on the original version of the Bill, which the Treasury has subsequently corrected. I just hope that the Public Bill Office has sorted out all my numbering; otherwise, I will have a lot of work ahead of me.

We should be extremely grateful to the Minister for providing the draft charter; otherwise, we would be relying purely on what is in the Bill, which leaves a large number of questions unanswered. Perhaps I may pursue the point raised by the Minister with regard to the fiscal mandate. There is no initial capital letter in “mandate” in the draft charter, which perhaps there should be. It states that the mandate is,

“a forward-looking target to achieve cyclically-adjusted current balance by the end of the rolling, five-year forecast period”.

That is an extremely important statement. My problem is that there are shades of Gordon Brown, rather like Banquo’s ghost, in the reference to “cyclically-adjusted”, because Gordon Brown was a master at changing the dates of when the cycle began. If the mandate is to mean anything at all, we need to know when the Government think that the cycle began. If my noble friend cannot answer now, perhaps he might come back to it later.