Liaison Committee Report

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Thursday 12th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alan Beith]

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady and, of course, the Public Accounts Committee produced a number of reports that are considered in the report to which I am referring today. My Committee, the Select Committee on Justice, believes that, just as the public pound should be followed wherever it goes, the information to which the public are entitled should remain their entitlement when services are carried out by private contractors, and that contracts should be written in such as way as to ensure that that access to freedom of information is not impaired by any privatisation process.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

I commend the right hon. Gentleman and his Committee for his very powerful report, and for it being commendably brief and very much to the point. Rarely can there have been as damning a sentence in any parliamentary report as

“The Prime Minister’s evidence to us in September did nothing to suggest that the Government has a coherent analysis of why things in Whitehall go wrong.”

The Government have indicated that they want to see changes to the civil service, but is it not a shame that the Liaison Committee, the most powerful Select Committee in this House, has to seek the Government’s permission to set up a parliamentary commission? If the Liaison Committee does not get the answer from the Government that it wants, what will it do?

[Sir Alan Beith]

That, as Ministers often say, is a hypothetical question that I ought not to answer. What I can say to my hon. Friend—and I thank him for his comments—is that the House could set up such a body, but the point of the exercise is to ensure that Front Benches are committed to the outcome. That is why we want those on both the Government and the Opposition Front Bench, aspiring as they do to be a Government, to recognise that it is in the interests of good government that we equip the civil service and enable it to do the job that it will need to do in the very different circumstances of today.