Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Margaret Hodge and Jackie Doyle-Price

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th October 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

Q That is very helpful. It feels to me that we have got to a position with GDPR where the practical implementation has gone beyond that safeguarding, actually, but we could tackle this by, perhaps, a much fuller statement and guidance about how we expect people to respect the protections but also the obligations that exist in terms of tackling crime.

Nigel Kirby: I think it would be very helpful to have, on the obligations, clear guidance from somewhere like the Information Commissioner’s Office—it has got good guidance, to be fair—as we move through this. Should the Bill be enacted and become legislation, guidance across the industry and from the relevant Government sectors or law enforcement sectors on how we do this and come together in the same way as we came together through the Bill, would be important and give clarity, because, as I am sure you are aware, Minister, there are different interpretations of things, different views and different risk appetites. That is normal in business. The views, legal interpretations and risk appetites will always be different, but where there is guidance to help us through this, with a positive intent from Parliament, that is always really helpful.

[Dame Margaret Hodge]

Q That has been really helpful on the information. I think that a slight amendment to what we are doing would help the GDPR issue.

I want to take you back—I could not quite hear what you said to Alison—to the SARs regime, if I may. It may not be your area of expertise, but it is a very important instrument for informing the enforcement agencies of where there may be a problem. The system is clearly broken—hundreds of thousands of SARs are landing on the desks of enforcement agencies. And we had the idea that they could be put into categories—risk categorised. I wonder whether you are able to comment on that at all, because if currently there is just a tick box—you send off your SARs and you have done it—too often the banks then carry on doing business with a suspicious person. Is there room in the Bill for doing something more on that regime, to ensure that the enforcement agencies are more effective in rooting out economic crime?

Nigel Kirby: I think the SARs regime and the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 itself actually need—well, not necessarily to be turned upside down, but to be looked at as a whole. I think an individual focus just on some aspect of SARs probably would not change the system in any particular—

Civil Service Reform

Debate between Margaret Hodge and Jackie Doyle-Price

Thursday 3rd April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Margaret Hodge]

I know where my hon. Friend is coming from, but we need the capability in government effectively to manage contracts whenever and by whomever they are delivered. There is a legacy in the civil service of focusing on policy, which is valued, but not implementation, which is vital, so we must challenge that culture.

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

Was the right hon. Lady as impressed as I was by Michael Spurr, the new head of the National Offender Management Service, who started his career as a prison officer, has front-line experience and is now chief executive? He was a breath of fresh air when he appeared before our Committee, because he really focused on what we have to do to deliver good public services.

[Margaret Hodge]

I entirely agree, and that takes me very neatly to my next point. Promotion in the civil service is all too often about moving to a job in another area, rather than focusing on one job and seeing it through to the end. I think that the hon. Lady would agree that the worst example the Committee has seen was the attempt to implement the new FiReControl policy, for which we saw 10 senior responsible officers in a matter of five years. It is no wonder the project went horribly wrong.

I think that there is still a culture in the civil service of being hostile to outsiders, rather than embracing the talents that can be brought in from all sorts of backgrounds and experiences, which I think are often seen as a threat. When I was a Minister, I brought three incredibly talented women into the Department for Education to try to implement policies. None of them now works anywhere in Government, even though they could contribute to policy implementation.

I also think that too often the civil service and Government are—dare I say it?— exploited by consultants. My Committee will shortly be looking at the sale of Royal Mail, which might be just the last in a line of examples of that. I recognise that some steps are being taken, such as the development of the Major Projects Authority and the academy for training in project management. They are all steps in the right direction, but they are not enough and they are not happening fast enough.

Secondly, Government are just poorly organised for delivering what is wanted and needed. Government still work in silos, which always leads to unintended consequences. To take a current example, local authorities have had massive cuts, which inevitably has an impact on their social care expenditure. At the same time, we have a health policy that is trying to get people out of hospitals and into the community, but without any money to support it.

Working in silos leads to a failure to learn from mistakes, with one Department simply replicating the mistakes made by another. The Committee has seen that in the mistakes made during the early implementation of the private finance initiative, for example. If we look at how the contracts for energy have been implemented, we see that lots of those errors have been duplicated in the current contracts that have been signed by the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

There is a failure at the centre to recognise the importance of a strong centre. My Committee has just received a letter from Sir Bob Kerslake, Nicholas Macpherson and Richard Heaton. We had written to them about the importance of having a strong centre. I will quote a few lines from their letter:

“Your Committee urges the Cabinet Office and the Treasury to take a strong strategic lead, as the Government’s corporate centre, in civil service reform and associated issues… However, the… central direction and integration that you appear to recommend does not reflect the model that this government and previous governments have operated.”

I do not know whether that is true. I have asked the Minister whether he agrees.

The letter goes on to state that

“the Centre does not and cannot take decisions or set a strong direction on every item of the £720 billion of public expenditure… the government machine is not like a holding company dominating its subsidiaries from a corporate centre.”

Well, I do not know what business of that magnitude would not have a strong centre and would wash its hands of its responsibility for the performance of its constituent parts. Since when have we, as politicians, signed up to the mantra? It is almost like claiming that there is no such thing as Government; only Departments with their Secretaries of State. Reform, if it is to ensure that coherence, efficiency and effectiveness are delivered across Government, must mean that we have strong central direction and much better integration than we currently enjoy.