Baroness Finn (Con)

My Lords, on this occasion I want to thank all noble Lords who have contributed. I hope that the Minister will recognise what we are proposing in this group are a series of amendments that would make meeting the objectives and purpose of the Bill easier. I thank her very much for her constructive approach. I especially enjoyed listening to the quotations from Managing Public Money, which used to be quoted extensively at me when I was in the Cabinet Office. The proposals in the amendments would ensure that fraud could be proactively investigated and counteracted. That is the only way that we will bring fraud rates down, provide an effective deterrent to potential fraudsters and prevent departments dodging oversight by failing to request an investigation. The noble Lord, Lord Palmer, made the sensible case that public authorities must not go only after low-hanging fruit and duck difficult investigations. I spent five long years as my noble friend Lord Maude of Horsham’s special adviser while he was in post. I spent that time learning from him, especially on the reluctance of the Treasury to engage properly with recovery on fraud. I am delighted that the PSFA has a dual remit and will report to both HMT and the Cabinet Office, but working closely with the Treasury was always a construct where the Treasury would assert its primacy, and I hope that does not happen in this instance if it works negatively. I had a strong sense of déjà vu while listening to my noble friend Lord Maude of Horsham. He is correct when he says it is wholly indefensible that the PSFA must wait to be invited to conduct investigations into wrongdoing, and we will be probing on that. The DWP does not wait to be invited before it goes after benefit cheats, and there is no reason why public officials should be held to a different standard. The exclusion of DWP and HMRC is perplexing. My noble friend Lord Maude of Horsham correctly picked up on that and made the case—convincingly, I thought—for their inclusion in the remit. The PSFA must always operate in the public interest, and ensuring that we have adequate thresholds for investigations is a well-established, sensible proposition. Our amendment would ensure that that threshold was included in the Bill so that we could be reassured that the PSFA would operate only once the reasonableness test had been satisfied, a point that was picked up by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox. The same can be said for a legal guarantee that recovering fraud must not come at a cost to the public authority in question. In conclusion, we believe that our amendments in this group would improve what the Government have already set out in the Bill, and we hope the Committee will support us in incorporating these improvements. On that basis, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.