Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown

I am really pleased that the hon. Gentleman has raised the whole business of devolution, because I am going to come on to that at the end of my speech. What I think we should do is build it from the bottom up, as we did, and let local people have a real say in what they want for the future of the delivery of their local services. I am going to say a little bit more about that and ask the Local Government Minister some quiet questions about it at the end. I turn to a matter that is bread and butter for the Public Accounts Committee, which the hon. Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green, the Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, also raised, which is the whole business of local auditing. Without proper auditing, there is no guarantee that all the money—I say “all the money”, but I just mean “the money”—that councils get from both council tax and local government grants, in one form or another, is being spent wisely and providing value for money. The shocking position that we find ourselves in with local auditing at the moment is not, I think, helping the whole system. The Public Accounts Committee recently held an evidence session on the whole of Government accounts, as the hon. Lady referred to, where we found that 44% of councils did not submit any data at all to those whole of Government accounts, and that 46% of accounts had not been audited for nearly five years, in some councils’ cases. The Local Government Minister has laid before the House measures to ameliorate the timing of producing local audits. Hopefully, we can get to a situation where we can start those local audits and get a set of figures we can begin to rely on. The next year, once we have started with an established set of figures, we hopefully ought to be able to get a properly audited set of accounts.