Member

The experience of my time on the Public Accounts Committee was very instructive. Yes, we had the big ticket showdowns with Starbucks, Amazon and others over tax, but quite often the unglamorous work of the committee—two reports and two meetings a week, backed up by 800 people in the National Audit Office—was to get into the minutiae and the granular detail of how the regulators were performing. Your Lordships will know that we very rarely had sitting Members of Parliament, whether Ministers or others, before us. We often had Permanent Secretaries there and often gave quite a hard time to regulators for failing in their duty. I am honest enough to admit that there were of course some significant failures in the previous Administration —Ofwat being one, along with the Financial Conduct Authority and others.