Public Bodies Bill [Lords]
Debate between Oliver Heald and Baroness Jowell(13 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Tessa Jowell
I certainly hope that the Minister will accept my invitation to rethink some of the Government’s proposals and ensure that the Committee stage involves genuine and proper scrutiny of some of the compelling individual cases. I also hope that he will show proper respect and understanding, not for, as it were, the headline description of a clutch of quangos, but for the vital functions that many such bodies perform—as my hon. Friend has so clearly described—in protecting the quality of life for people across the country in a variety of different ways.
Tessa Jowell
If the hon. Gentleman does not mind, I am going to make some progress, as there are lots of Back Benchers who want to speak in this debate.
The approach that the Government have taken in this Bill is the opposite of the clear and costed plan that was produced by the last Government. They are abolishing and merging bodies, in some cases without any idea of what their functions are. Again, I hope that a greater understanding of those functions will result from further scrutiny. Even now, more than 10 months after the review of public bodies began, we are still in the dark over what the Government have planned for a number of the bodies in this Bill. A number of consultations have begun, but the Government are not even waiting for the results. Consultation was eventually promised on the regional development agencies, but it has now been withdrawn because it would disrupt the process of disassembling RDAs that is already under way. Today the Secretary of State for Justice has announced a public consultation on all the bodies that affect his Department, but this will report after the Bill has gone through Parliament. Therefore, the Minister here today is effectively asking this House to give its permission fundamentally to change or to abolish those bodies before his colleagues have decided what will be put in their place.
While the Government cut quangos in this Bill, they are adding hundreds of bodies elsewhere. Let us take the national health service. As a result of the Government’s chaotic approach to the NHS, they have tripled the number of statutory bodies in the NHS, which now number 521. There will now be new shadow commissioning groups and authorised commissioning groups, primary care trust clusters, strategic health authority clusters, clinical networks and clinical senates, all of which will be overseen by the NHS commissioning board, which the chief executive of the NHS has described as
“the greatest quango in the sky”.
The question that we now have to ask the Minister is whether, even with the passage of this Bill, he believes that there will be fewer public bodies in 2015 than when he first entered his Department. What is his baseline number and what will be the number of quangos in 2015? I am happy to give way to him if he wishes to speak at the Dispatch Box. Okay, the House will note the absence of an answer to that question. The Government do not even know how much money they are going to save. In an article in The Sun—the Minister’s newspaper of choice for these purposes—in March, he claimed that the Government would save £30 billion in spending on quangos,
“so we can protect jobs and frontline services”.
What he failed to mention was that the majority of those savings were from cuts to the very front-line services that he had pledged to save. Almost £25 billion are from cuts to housing and universities, with almost another £2 billion from our arts, our sports and our museums. Only £2.6 billion of the claimed savings were from actual administration, and even that figure has now come under scrutiny.
In written evidence submitted to the Public Administration Committee, the Minister’s own Department admitted that only £1.6 billion of cumulative administrative savings can be found. Perhaps the Minister would like to explain to the House where the other £1 billion of administrative savings are likely to come from. [Interruption.] Again, the Minister appears not to know where the administrative savings will come from, and this is before the Government have even looked at redundancies, which are a major cost of any organisational transformation. The Local Government Chronicle has estimated that the bill for redundancies at the RDAs alone will cost the Government at least £100 million, yet the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has not even estimated how much they will cost in this financial year. Information gathered from parliamentary answers shows that out of all the Departments affected, only two have so far made estimates of the likely costs of redundancies, neither of which is the Department headed by the Minister. The Minister should take this opportunity to admit to the House that he has no idea what the net savings will be from his reform of public bodies, and no idea of the cost of the redundancies. This deeply flawed Bill is part of a deeply flawed, ill -thought-out programme of reform that could well end up costing more money than it is projected to save.