Anna Turley

It is, as always, a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir John. I want to take a moment to pay huge tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Walsall and Bloxwich (Valerie Vaz). She is the epitome of a first-class MP and a doughty champion for her constituents, picking up local issues that people care passionately about and bringing them to the heart of Government. If anyone can knock heads together and make things happen, I believe it will be her. I look forward to seeing over the next few years all those problems solved. I wish I could stand here with the power to wave a wand and give my right hon. Friend all the things she has asked for, but she has put them on the record, which is the purpose of this place. Ministers and Secretaries of State will hear what she has said, and I will do anything I can to support her in taking these matters forward. I have every confidence that the people of Walsall and Bloxwich could not ask for a better representative, and I completely agree with everything she has said. Public bodies should be accountable and responsive, with democratic oversight. That is the foundation of our democracy. I understand my right hon. Friend’s frustration, because it is one that I share as an elected representative—even as a member of the Government. It can sometimes feel that decisions are taken too far away from the people we are meant to serve. People expect their Member of Parliament to have power and their Government to be responsive to them. When they vote for change, they expect those they voted for to be able to deliver. Too often we see layers of bureaucracy building up over many years. We see power handed to unelected officials and arm’s length bodies that no one has ever heard of. All too often democratically elected Ministers—who are accountable to the public—pull the levers, but arm’s length bodies do not respond, and control sits in the wrong place. Far too often, such bodies have been an easy solution when there has been a problem in government and no policy solution; it is a case of saying, “Create another body, create another commission,” but all that does is to take decisions further away from the people they are there to serve. I am delighted to say that in April this year, the Government ordered a fundamental review of arm’s length bodies. I am really excited to be the Minister playing a part in delivering that review. We no longer live in a world where we can simply spend our way to better public services. We have to rewire the state through system-wide reform, which is what we are undertaking to do. I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Walsall and Bloxwich for raising this issue. She is right to recognise that the existing landscape of public bodies is overly complex, needs streamlining, and needs to be accountable in order to deliver our plan for change. The Prime Minister himself said in his speech earlier this year: “It is not about questioning the dedication or the effort of civil servants. It is about the system that we have in place. That system was created by politicians… But…over a number of years politicians chose to hide behind a vast array of quangos, arm’s length bodies and regulators”. I am pleased to tell my right hon. Friend that we will hide no more. Through our programme of work to reform the state, of which arm’s length bodies are a part, we will ensure that Ministers have the right accountability where services are delivered, and that those public services are delivered in the simplest, most effective way, ensuring value for money for taxpayers. We launched the review on 7 April. It is examining the Government’s more than 300 arm’s length bodies and asking Departments to assess them against four key principles. The first key principle is ministerial policy oversight. Nationally important policies must be steered and controlled by Ministers. The public expect that level of accountability. The second is duplication and efficiency. We have to root that out wherever possible, including overlaps between arm’s length bodies and Departments. The third key principle is stakeholder management. The Government have to engage with partners and constituents—the people—at every stage, but that cannot in its own right justify an arm’s length body’s existence. The fourth is independent advice. The Government think that arm’s length decisions should be justified only where there is a clear case for it, such as the need for operationally independent regulatory decisions. There should not be any other reason for decisions to be taken at arm’s length. If those challenges are not met, arm’s length bodies should not exist—it is that simple. Our aims are straightforward: we will drive out waste and inefficiency across Whitehall, save the taxpayer money and cut the cost of doing government. More importantly, we are bringing democratic scrutiny back to the major decisions that affect people’s lives through ministerial control. The review is ongoing, but we have already announced a number of changes to arm’s length bodies, which my right hon. Friend may have heard about. For example, we are abolishing NHS England and the Education and Skills Funding Agency. Doing so has returned nearly £250 billion of Government funding to direct ministerial oversight, ensuring that decisions about the NHS and the school system—a crucial issue mentioned by both my right hon. Friend and my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell)—are taken by the Health and Education Secretaries, as they should be.