John Bercow
Main Page: John Bercow (Speaker - Buckingham)Nuclear Management Partners (Sellafield)
John Bercow Excerpts(9 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
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Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)
The great thing about a National Audit Office report is that it is consensually agreed between the Department and the NAO. I am afraid that rather disproves the points that the Secretary of State has tried to make. He tried to locate the original plan in 2008 under the now Leader of the Opposition, but the report says that the previous plan was designed in 2007. The Secretary of State called this the revised plan, but the NAO report is very clear that, in fact, the
“Authority accepted the revised plan in May 2011”,
so this is a revision of the revision that his predecessor approved. Finally, the report was produced in 2012, when the Secretary of State was in post, and states that there were significant uncertainties back then. Why did he not act on the uncertainties that he agreed with the NAO existed then and work up an improvement for the time break in the contract?
Mr Speaker
I think the hon. Gentleman is planning for a future career as a regius professor in which he has an attentive audience, no interruption and can expatiate at a length of his own choice. We shall see what happens.
Mr Davey
Mr Speaker, I think I understood what you just said.
I must tell the hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) that he possibly should have listened a little more carefully to what I said. The original contract was engaged with and drawn up by the Minister who preceded the Leader of the Opposition, but it came into force when the right hon. Gentleman was doing my job.
The issue we have looked at is that of the model, which was designed under the previous Government and which we inherited. The contract that the hon. Gentleman talked about was looked at and then rolled forward, but the issue at stake is the model. We are changing the model of the management structure for the better, because the one we inherited was complex and expensive.