Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Caroline Flint and Baroness Morgan of Cotes

Monday 25th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Flint (Don Valley) (Lab)]

On 20 April, the Comptroller and Auditor General, Sir Amyas Morse, provided an adverse opinion for the second year running on the truth and fairness of the Department for Education’s group financial statements. Sir Amyas said:

“Providing Parliament with a clear view of academy trusts’ spending is a vital part of the Department for Education’s work—yet it is failing to do this.”

How will the Secretary of State ensure that Parliament will be able to see whether extending academies is giving the taxpayer good value for money, when that clearly is not happening now?

[Nicky Morgan]

I utterly refute what the right hon. Lady has just said. We have a more rigorous system for the governance of individual academies when they become academies. The issue with the Department’s consolidated accounts is a technical and accounting problem caused by academies producing accounts covering the academic year to the end of August, rather than to the end of March. We have now agreed with Parliament a new methodology for the current financial year that will better reflect the situation.

Localism Bill

Debate between Caroline Flint and Baroness Morgan of Cotes

Monday 17th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Flint]

I give way to the hon. Lady.

[Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)]

Following the question put by her hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins), does the right hon. Lady get thanks from her local residents when she meets them for almost doubling most of their council taxes?

[Caroline Flint]

The record will show that for many years under the Labour Government it was Conservative councils, not Labour ones, that increased their council tax.

This Bill is meant to take power from Whitehall and devolve it to local communities, but we find on closer inspection that it provides an arsenal of more than 100 new powers for the Secretary of State. It should be retitled the “only if I say so” Bill, because if the Secretary of State does not like it, it ain’t happening.

Much has been made of the introduction of local referendums, and we support mechanisms that promote public engagement in the political process, but when the Bill gives the Secretary of State the power to decide what is or is not a local matter and on what local people can and cannot have a say, just how deep the Government’s commitment is to localism is called into question. Far from devolving power as we were promised, this Bill represents a massive accumulation of power in the hands of the Secretary of State. If nothing else, at least we now know why the Government were forced to drop the word “decentralisation” from the Bill’s title.