Budget Responsibility and National Audit Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Turnbull and Lord Barnett

Wednesday 1st December 2010 Grand Committee

[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.