Budget Responsibility and National Audit Bill [HL]

Lord Turnbull Excerpts

Wednesday 1st December 2010 Grand Committee

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, in answer to the first question, to be clear again, it is certainly the case that there is a group which is executive and expert and then there is a second group, described at the moment in the Bill as “non-expert”, which is also non-executive. That second group could be experts, there is nothing to rule that out, but the point is that they do not have to be experts; they should, however, be sufficiently independently minded, supportive and challenging of the executive expert members.

We have put in “two or more” because at the moment we think that the remit of the OBR and the construct should be perfectly sufficient and workable for robust government arrangements. That is the minimum number. To have one non-exec would put that individual in an impossible position; two gets you to the minimum. If the OBR’s remit were somehow to develop in an unanticipated way, it might be appropriate to modestly expand the number of non-exec non-experts, but that is not the intention at the moment.

[Lord Turnbull]

I suggest to the Minister one possible use of this third post: at some stage, it might be thought helpful to recruit someone who has experience in a different country of how this kind of arrangement has worked. The two non-executives—I really do not know why we do not just settle on that as a description, because they are expert at being non-executives—could well be supplemented by someone who brings some other dimension to the affair.

[Lord Sassoon]

That is a very helpful thought. I shall in another context say that the parallel with the MPC is not at all inappropriate. For example, in the MPC or the board of the FSA there is a good record in the UK in recent years of bringing in relevant experts from overseas. I entirely agree with the noble Lord’s thought.

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[The Lord Bishop of Chester]

My Lords, it would be a great mistake to regard being opposed to sin as the sole prerogative of the Church of England. I hope that the whole Committee is opposed to sin.

I have some sympathy with the Minister on this. My problem with this part of the schedule is that it feels too in-house to me—too much the same. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is involved in the appointments and perhaps the Select Committee will be involved. I should have thought that the office needs a certain amount of diversity; its independence requires a greater diversity. It strikes me that the schedule is too tightly constrained as it is and to constrain it further by saying that the Select Committee of the other place has to be involved each time feels odd. I would almost expect the Governor of the Bank of England to nominate a member. We need a greater sense of diversity and independence in what is supposed to be an arm’s-length body. This body is in danger of not being sufficiently arm’s length from government. On that ground alone, I support the Minister’s resistance. However, I have a problem in that the whole thing seems a bit too in-house as it is.

[Lord Turnbull]

The noble Lord, Lord Higgins, referred to making this more acceptable to the committee. I remember reading the report of the committee in another place: it did not actually ask for this. It asked for powers on appointment, and for powers of dismissal, which are built in here. Members of that committee did not think this was necessary and I am prepared to back that judgment.

[Lord Sassoon]

I am grateful to the right reverend Prelate. I hope that he will forgive me if I do not offer any thoughts on sin. I know my limitations. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, for reminding us that the Treasury Select Committee has not asked for this. We need to get back to the substance of this. Yes, the OBR is a critically important entity. I would not characterise its role quite in the way that the noble Lord, Lord Peston, did, as being involved in economic policy-making, but we had that discussion two days ago. The OBR is critically important. It has a role which it has already begun by producing the official economic forecast. Because that is such an important role, we have as a Government, in agreement with the Treasury Select Committee, come forward with a most unusual role for the committee in respect of appointment of the executive members of the OBR. That in itself emphasises the special nature of this entity.

We have recognised the special role of this body in the executive appointment process, but as to the non-execs, we should not get too excited and think that their role is very different. Are we really saying that the non-execs here have a completely different role to the non-execs on, say, the UK Statistics Authority board, which is another critically important part of the architecture? We risk over-engineering this.

Another point that no one has made is that all public sector appointments are subject to an independent process and a series of safeguards. We must not forget that this is not part of a closed process. I believe that the overall construct is appropriate and we should not over-engineer it, particularly in a way that the Treasury Select Committee has not asked for.

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[Lord Newby]

My Lords, the provision in paragraph 8(2) of Schedule 1is sensible. It states:

“Staff are to be employed on such terms as to remuneration and other matters as the Office may, with the approval of the Minister for the Civil Service, determine”.

Surely that is the sensible way of doing it, with the chairman deciding which staff he wants. It would be slightly surprising if none of them came from a Civil Service econometrics background, which would bring strength to the office. Just because they have come out of Whitehall does not mean that they are somehow tied hand and foot to Treasury thinking. No doubt, people will come in from academia and elsewhere. It is for the chairman himself to decide who the best people are to do the job.

[Lord Turnbull]

I support the noble Lord, Lord Newby. As I understand it, the number of staff would be around 20. Some may be seconded from the Treasury, some may be brought in from academia, and some may come from somewhere else. It is basically for the chairman of the OBR to assemble the best team that he wants, and we should not fetter that discretion, because there is a safeguard in Clause 5(2), which states:

“The Office must perform that duty objectively, transparently and impartially”.

In other words, anyone who is on loan from another government department is subject to that duty, which should ensure that the right degree of independence is maintained. If you say that someone with a Civil Service career must resign from the Civil Service in order to go and work for the OBR, you will raise all sorts of issues relating to pensions, seniority, this, that and the other. You will make it difficult to assemble the best-quality team, and that should be paramount.

[Lord Myners]

I agree with those comments. However, the duties described in Clause 5(2) are subject to guidance given under Clause 6(1)(b), which slightly diminishes the confidence and reliance we can place on Clause 5(2).

I support the intention of this clause, but cannot bring myself to support the wording of the amendment. The majority of the staff of the OBR, certainly until quite recently, were former Treasury officials, and the majority are doing work that is very similar to the work that they were doing before the establishment of the interim OBR—work that they are now allowed to appear to criticise through the OBR. They are still in the Treasury building, they are still going to the excellent Treasury canteen for their subsidised lunches and they are still entitled to belong to the Treasury choir and the Treasury glee club. They have not left the Treasury. What we are seeking to achieve is appropriate distancing—but not at the cost of denying the OBR the best people to do the job. It is not unreasonable to assume that currently at least some of them will be working in the Treasury.

The difficulty that I have with the drafting of the amendment is the reference to “transferred temporarily”. “Temporarily” assumes some knowledge of the future. I see a situation in which somebody may go from the Treasury to the OBR and later return to the Treasury without that necessarily having been planned. There must be clear severance in employment terms: it must be quite clear that staff have left the Treasury and are now employed by the OBR. The independent, non-executive directors should keep a particularly close focus on where people are recruited from and where they go afterwards, in order to make sure that the effectiveness and credibility of the body is not diminished by a greater flow between the Treasury and the OBR than common sense might justify. However, I cannot bring myself to support the amendment as it is drafted.

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[Baroness Noakes]

My Lords, I profoundly disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Peston. I do not know what the initial position might be in the OBR in that they might all be initial employees. But we would restrict the OBR’s access to a pool of talented people if we insisted that they could work in the OBR only if they became its employees and severed any employment connections with other organisations. The OBR will be a small organisation, so in order to get good people it may well need to attract them through shorter secondments, whether to handle specific issues or to be part of the staff more generally. Over time, we have to allow the OBR that flexibility, and there is nothing wrong with that. People move in and out of all sorts of organisations throughout Whitehall and are brought in whenever it is necessary.

[Lord Turnbull]

My Lords, I am amazed at the sheer unrealism of the proposition of the noble Lord, Lord Peston. If this is enacted, there will be a major crisis in the organisation. Around 20 people will have to take a decision whether to resign from the Treasury or quit the OBR and go back to the Treasury. That is something we could absolutely do without. The initial staff in large majority are secondees. We have not complained about their work. We did not say that the report produced last week was ineffective or that we did not trust it because the staff are seconded. The noble Lord is imposing something that will be damaging to the credibility of the organisation and will make it much more difficult to attract people of the quality it needs. As I have said, a major problem will be created immediately if such a proposition is enacted.

[Lord Peston]

I did not create this problem. I did not set this body up. Unlike all other noble Lords present, I do not happen to be much in favour of it, but that is another matter. The fact is that our duty in this House, when a piece of legislation is going through, is to make it better. That is our role. So this is not my responsibility, but my point is that if we are going to have such a body, whose essence is its independence, if it turns out that the staff are secondees, that undermines its independence. It will not be independent any more.

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[Lord Barnett]

I shall say a word about Amendment 34. It seeks to provide that:

“The Office will place in the public domain a record of all meetings with the Chancellor … and other ministers”.

When I tabled a Question for Written Answer on this matter for the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon, he asked Robert Chote to answer it. Mr Chote has duly written to me and I shall quote from it:

“We will be publishing a list of contacts between the OBR and ministers, special advisers and their private offices shortly after each autumn and Budget forecast, beginning with our forthcoming forecast on November 29th”.

I do not know when the list is going to be published and I have not seen it, but it is clear that regular formal or informal meetings with the Chancellor and other Ministers are a very important matter for an independent forecaster, one that is not available to our other 50-odd forecasters. So I hope we will have an answer to this very soon. That is the whole purpose of Amendment 34.

I shall not add to my remarks because I am trying hard to curtail my contributions so that we get to the target figure of amendments that the Government want to see dealt with. But far be it from me to prevent Members of the Committee speaking.

[Lord Turnbull]

My Lords, it seems that an analogy is being drawn with the Monetary Policy Committee, whose minutes are produced. What happens at the Bank is this. On the preceding Friday of the week in which the committee meets, the members spend the whole day going through virtually every possible economic indicator and receive reports from the agents around the country. That is a meeting, but no minutes are taken. I think the members then meet on the Tuesday afternoon and hold discussions during which they try to sift out what the main measures are to be. Again, there are no minutes, or certainly none that are published. The members then come together at the formal meeting, which is where they take decisions and where the minutes for the record are produced.

In other words, they do not produce a running commentary. We are told here that the BRC has more than 40 challenge meetings with officials from other departments, in addition to numerous meetings at staff level. That is complete overkill and, I would say, a false analogy with the Bank to assume that each of those meetings has to be minuted and published. This thing is published—there are 150 pages of it—and it is produced twice a year. Everything else is work in progress, which leads to the production of the report. We should be satisfied with the fact that it is produced, eventually, after talking to whomever the committee wants to and whatever progress it wants to make. Some of that will include what is or is not in the Budget; some of it goes to the nature of fiscal policy. What is eventually produced is this report. Those are the minutes and I do not think that we need anything beyond them.

[Lord Sassoon]

I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, who, I think, gets it absolutely right. There is a further point, which he did not stress, which is that the Monetary Policy Committee is a policy-making committee. It is therefore important to understand how policy, and the thinking behind the policy, is being made. The OBR is not making policy; it is producing forecasts. They are very important forecasts and that is a critical function, but it is not policy-making that requires minutes to understand.