Lord Shipley
Main Page: Lord Shipley (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)Local Audit and Accountability Bill [HL]
Lord Shipley Excerpts
Lord Shipley
My Lords, I declare my vice-presidency of the Local Government Association.
I have listened very carefully to what the noble Lord, Lord Christopher, has said and I share some of his concerns about risk. These will have to be addressed in the passage of the Bill and afterwards. However, I am fully behind the broad approach that the Government have taken. It is the right decision to abolish the Audit Commission, and there are a number of reasons why I believe that.
I was a board member of One North East, the RDA, and a member of its audit committee for a number of years. I could never understand why my council was being audited by the Audit Commission ultimately and why the development agency, a government department, was audited by the National Audit Office. I always felt that there was scope for savings to be made in the way that audit was managed.
There is inevitably risk in any change but, if asked the question, “Do I think there is a need for two nationally based auditors auditing the public sector?”, the answer is no, you can do with one. However, there has to be a number of provisions to ensure that the independence of audit and the functions undertaken by the Audit Commission are protected as far as is needed.
When the Audit Commission was set up, I was very positive. I said at Second Reading that it did good work in financial audit and carried out good value-for-money studies. I said that it suffered from mission creep and a target-based, tick-box culture, in which it set both its own programme of work and its own fees base. I could never understand why it was that they were allowed to do this. I am therefore quite attracted by the idea of having an independent local audit committee which is actually charged with overseeing some of these matters.