Public Accounts Committee

Jackie Doyle-Price Excerpts

Thursday 16th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

I, too, have the pleasure of being a member of the Public Accounts Committee, serving under the probing chairmanship of the right hon. Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge). I want to follow up some of the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Cambridgeshire (Stephen Barclay). Sometimes serving on the Committee does feel a bit like being in “Groundhog Day”, as we see the same issues arising again and again in relation to delays in executing contracts, poor management and so on. I want to concentrate on one theme leading from that, which is leadership.

Leadership is crucial to the delivery of any programme. It involves the ability to take ownership, and to ensure that projects are delivered to deadline and on budget, and that they are fit for purpose and deliver the objectives that they are meant to achieve. Too often, we have found such leadership lacking. My message to my colleagues on the Front Bench is that, given the public spending constraints that we now face, value for money is of central importance, and the Treasury needs to play a much stronger role in ensuring that Departments deliver their obligations. For that reason, I heartily endorse the sentiments in the motion, which will put ministerial accountability at the heart of delivering value for money. Hitherto, the Committee has not called Ministers to give evidence, but I am fast coming round to the view that there is a case for doing that, so that Treasury and Cabinet Office Ministers can tell us what they are doing to ensure that their colleagues across government are delivering against their obligations.

The right hon. Member for Barking referred to the Committee’s report on the 2007 comprehensive spending review. Ministers should read that report, to see where things might go wrong in the current spending environment. There was a massive discrepancy between Departments in the degree to which they were able to deliver against the cuts that were required of them. In particular, the Department for Communities and Local Government had achieved only 5% of its required savings halfway through the inquiry. That brings me back to the importance of leadership and the importance of government as a machine ensuring that the principle of value for money really is pushed all the way through the system.

Other colleagues want to speak in the debate so I shall close by drawing the House’s attention to the private finance initiative, which has been the subject of a great deal of work by the Committee. In the recent past, the machinery of government has been rather too attached to PFI as a funding stream, with delivery being focused on completing a deal rather than on whether the PFI contract really represented value for money for the taxpayer and whether it would deliver what was required. The Committee examined the role of the PFI after the credit crunch. We found that the banks had increased the cost of financing PFI projects by up to a third, and that the risks had been transferred back to the public sector at an additional cost of £1 billion to the taxpayer.

It is not surprising that financing costs rose following the credit crunch, but it is very disappointing that the Treasury did not use that occasion to challenge the view that the PFI was still an appropriate funding vehicle for many projects. The contract for the widening of the M25 has already been mentioned. The cost of that was increased by 23%, or £660 million. In the past few weeks, the Secretary of State for Transport has had to announce significant cuts in his expenditure. It is clear that the delivery of other projects has been jeopardised. We are locked into some PFI contracts for 30 years, which means that those that are of poor value will clearly be of ongoing poor value to the taxpayer.

Moreover, a contract of that length is not suitable for some services. Facilities need to be able to react to the constantly changing needs of hospitals, for example. If we nail everything down in a PFI contract, we embed inflexibility in the system. NHS South West Essex primary care trust in my constituency is in a very poor financial state, and is implementing a severe programme of cuts to deal with an overspend. Sitting in the middle is Brentwood community hospital, an underused facility funded by an expensive PFI contract.

My message to the Government is very simple. The Treasury and Ministers throughout Government must be vigilant and fleet of foot in ensuring that their Departments deliver value for money, and a central part of that will consist of responding to the findings in our reports. I look to the Treasury in particular to ensure that appropriate leadership is given, and that we deliver better value for the taxpayer.