Defence Reform

Debate between Bob Stewart and Hugh Bayley

Tuesday 26th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

As an ex-NATO officer, may I point out that the North Atlantic Council can sit in Prime Minister or President form, Foreign Minister form, Defence Minister form or permanent representative form? Governments are therefore represented on the North Atlantic Council, to which IBAN reports.

[Hugh Bayley]

Governments are represented, but Parliaments are not. The principle in the UK is that the National Audit Office belongs and reports to Parliament. It has reported to Parliament for 150 years on UK defence expenditure, while obviously keeping secret things that must necessarily be kept secret, so there is no reason why we cannot have public reporting of defence expenditure.

NATO’s international board of auditors audited 49 separate sets of NATO accounts last year. I recently met Tim Banfield, a director of the NAO who is responsible for UK defence audits. He told me that NATO’s financial statements are frequently audited late, sometimes by as much as three years, which is not compliant with decent accounting standards—auditors who are trying to track expenditure cannot find the answers to the questions they need to ask three years after an operation has closed down. I asked a Foreign Office Minister how good the audits are, because they are not published. He told me that of the 49 sets of accounts last year, 14 were qualified by the auditors because of irregularities.

In addition to the financial audits, five performance audits—value-for-money audits—were carried out last year, but there is little evidence that NATO changes how it works to improve value for money in response to their conclusions. Only one of those 49 sets of accounts has been put into the public domain, according to NATO’s website.

The failure to publish accounts reduces the pressure on NATO managers to respond to deficiencies when they are revealed by audits, and to improve their performance. I raise this matter with the Minister now because I believe there is a narrow window of opportunity to change things, because the NATO Secretary-General has commissioned the new deputy Secretary-General to review the audit function. I shall share with the House a brief extract from a document provided by the Secretary-General to national delegations, including the UK ambassador to NATO. The Secretary-General said:

“We must adopt best practices employed by other international organisations. NATO is very unusual in having its own auditing service…Organisations that employ external public-service auditors include UNESCO, WTO, OSCE and the OECD.

To bring us into line with best practice, I propose the adoption of the same approach, phased in to ensure continuity of work.”

He goes on to make the point that the only other body that does not have an independent external audit function is the EU, from which some hon. Members would not like to take lessons in that respect.

The NATO Secretary-General clearly wants change, but the decision will not be made by him; it will be made by the North Atlantic Council. Will the UK representative at the North Atlantic Council, whether our ambassador, one of our Ministers or the Prime Minister, support the change agenda? Will the deputy Secretary-General’s report be shown to the NAO and the supreme audit institutions of other member states, such as the US Government Accountability Office, for comment before it is shown to the North Atlantic Council? Will our ambassador lobby representatives of other member states to build a coalition to change the audit function within NATO and to bring the information, apart from that which necessarily must be kept secret for security reasons, into the public domain?

That information will drive improved value for money within NATO. NATO can hardly urge its member states to deliver more value for money if it does not take a lead by doing so itself.