Birmingham City Council

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Tuesday 19th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I call the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee.

[Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

I welcome the appointment of Max Caller, who has a strong track record of making these difficult decisions and helping councils to turn around, but the Secretary of State will know that task and finish was a big part of what happened in Birmingham. Does he have oversight of which other councils are still doing that? Nearly 30 years ago, at Islington Council, we were looking at those issues and tackling them.

The big issue here—the elephant in the room—is local audit. Some 12% of audit opinions for the 2021-22 financial year have come in, even with the extended deadline. The permanent secretary and the National Audit Office have indicated that we need to focus on the current year and to forget previous years, but these canaries in the mine, these warning signs, were never heard because of the dire state of local audit. This has all been on his Government’s watch. Can he give us any reassurance that he really has a plan to get local audit back on track?

[Michael Gove]

First, I thank the hon. Lady for her kind words about Max Caller. He is a first-class professional, and I know he will do an excellent job with the other commissioners. Secondly, I think it is fair to say—I do not want to make a party political point—that the local audit situation requires both investment and leadership. One of the first things I sought to do when I arrived in the Department was to ensure that the Office for Local Government can play a system leadership role in helping to reform and improve that process. I completely agree with the hon. Lady on that.

The hon. Lady’s central point was about task and finish, which some Members may think sounds like a good thing. A task and finish group is a team that sets out to resolve a problem and dissolves itself when the problem is finished. It seems to be the model of what we should have in administration: not a permanent bureaucracy, but a taskforce. However, task and finish in Birmingham, and indeed in some other local authorities, has basically meant the binmen—the scaffies, as we would say in Scotland—knocking off early as soon as they had claimed that they had finished their task and yet claiming for their full working day. Again, it is not an effective way to run any public service.