Contribution
My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 5 and 6 in the names of my noble friends on the Front Bench.
As I have said, I was the Minister for the Cabinet Office for five long years, during the entirety of the coalition Government—I am not sure that anyone else has been there for that long. Despite the best efforts of some in the higher levels of the Civil Service to have me promoted, moved sideways or eventually fired, I survived and outlasted them all. This was when the coalition Government took over—a time of fiscal crisis, with a budget deficit of some 11% of GDP—and it was urgent that the costs of government should be reduced. We were pretty successful in that: we reduced the running cost of government cumulatively over five years by £52 billion. We were DOGE before anyone had thought of it, and, frankly, we did it much more effectively.
One of the elements that we pursued was fraud and error, and indeed debt. We were surprised to discover that activity to counter fraud, reduce error and recover debt was not being seriously co-ordinated. You would have thought that this would be a core function of the Treasury but it was not; the Treasury’s view was that this should all be done in each of the individual silos, and of course that militates against effectiveness.
On the skill sets around countering fraud, et cetera, we concluded that this was a cross-cutting function that runs right across government and needs to be seen in that way. We started to introduce in a slightly makeshift way—piecemeal, making it up as we went along—what we now call the functional model. This is where these cross-cutting functions—procurement, IT and digital, major projects, and HR—are strongly led from the centre of government, with visibility into what is happening in those functions right across the Government. Of course, it is through all those functions, including financial management, that the money gets spent. However, the Treasury’s view, which is true of most finance ministries anywhere in the world, is that it looks at the verticals, and if something is in an approved budget line, that is it—you get on and do what you like.
There is an underlying assumption that all public servants are equally concerned about conserving public money but, regrettably, that is not universally the case. It is essential that there should be proper central oversight. Given the reluctance of the Treasury to take this seriously—as my noble friend Lord Agnew demonstrated vigorously when he resigned in the middle of a speech on exactly this subject, highlighting the reluctance of the Treasury to give it sufficient focus—the Cabinet Office is the place for this to be done. There needs to be proper oversight into how these functions are being run and are operating, and providing some real-time accountability rather than waiting for the Public Accounts Committee some time after the event, generally after the horse has bolted.
That is why allowing the Minister, through the Public Sector Fraud Authority, to intervene only at the request of a public authority seems justifiable in relation to the wider public sector, but in relation to central government departments, agencies, authorities and so on, it seems to be wholly indefensible. There is an assumption that all these authorities and entities will be so concerned to disclose what has gone on in their departments, in their own backyards, that they will willingly ask the Cabinet Office to intervene and be charged a fee for the privilege. I have to say that real life tells us that this is unlikely to happen because we have real-life experience to look at. When, during the coalition Government, it was disclosed that in one major department two suppliers to government had been systematically overcharging that department over not just a short period but a decade or so, it turned out that this had been known about for some time.