Economic Affairs and Work and Pensions

Douglas Carswell Excerpts

Tuesday 8th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

I welcome the hon. Gentleman back to the House, but I shall not be drawn down the path whereby new, eager and young—or no longer so young—Members jump up with every cherished item of Government expenditure and pose such questions. The hon. Gentleman will have to wait for the spending review and Budget for a discussion of the whole Government programme, but he should not assume anything from that answer.

The next thing that we will do is bring together, from within the Government and outside, the best people in their fields. We want the best civil servants helping us in that collective effort, not defending their Whitehall Departments. We want the inspirational head teachers, the chief inspectors in the police service and the nurses with new ideas to have their opportunity to put their ideas to us. The remit will be to innovate, to challenge entrenched ways of doing things and to identify the best ideas from throughout the world; and, in order to ensure that the resulting reform programme is achieved, we will establish robust mechanisms to ensure accountability to the public.

Thirdly, the spending review will cover the large, cross-cutting areas of Government spending. We will set out our plans to reform the welfare system and restrain the cost of public sector pay and pensions, and for capital spending we will undertake a fundamental review of spending plans to identify the areas of spending that will achieve the greatest economic returns. Opposition Members should know that we have inherited a capital budget that is set to halve.

[Mr Douglas Carswell (Clacton) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend has been quoted talking about having a Star Chamber to oversee public spending. For years, have we not had an elite clique of Treasury officials doing precisely that? Somehow, no Executive quite manage to rein in the executive as planned. Why not in addition try a radical solution and give the newly liberated Select Committees powers to curb departmental spending? As well as fixing our finances, that might give Parliament some purpose.

[Mr Osborne]

I am probably going to regret this, but I am quite attracted to the idea that my hon. Friend has proposed, not just in the Chamber today but to me privately; I think he has also written about it. The key thing that he proposes is that Select Committees should be able to recommend reductions, rather than increases, in Government Department budgets. I would certainly welcome that if we were ever to proceed in that direction.

I honestly mean it when I say to my hon. Friend that I am attracted to his idea. I will come back to him and see whether we can take it forward. Obviously, it would be the collective decision of the Government, rather than mine alone. My hon. Friend is right to say that we are trying to get away from it simply being the Treasury that conducts the spending review, imposing its decisions on everyone else.

I believe that when Tony Blair was Prime Minister, he and the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath would simply agree a total. Every Secretary of State would then receive the number in an envelope, before it was announced to the press about 20 minutes later. We are going to have a more collegiate approach and we are genuinely seeking to engage as many people as possible—the brightest civil servants across all the Government Departments and the best people from the devolved Administrations, pressure groups, independent think-tanks and front-line public services. There will be a Cabinet committee to chair and oversee the process and its membership will be restricted to those Cabinet Ministers with very small budgets of their own. Other Cabinet Ministers will be eligible to be members of the committee once they have settled their departmental allocations. That will create an incentive structure within the Cabinet.

Finally, over the summer we are going to conduct a wide public engagement exercise so that the whole country has a chance to get involved. We have already begun to implement the most radical transparency agenda that the country has ever seen. The hon. Member for West Bromwich East (Mr Watson) and I were talking earlier about the £25,000 disclosure limit for central Government expenditure. The previous Chancellor refused my freedom of information request to publish the Treasury’s combined online information system, or COINS, database of public spending. But the current Chancellor of the Exchequer has accepted that request and the raw data in the COINS database are now available online.