Anna Turley

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. She articulates the struggle that so many of us find in picking up bits of casework and trying to champion our constituents’ needs and wishes; we can get lost in the matrix, and it can be deeply frustrating. I know that Secretaries of State, including the Health and Education Secretaries, see that. They want to know that their decisions are having a real impact, and that there are not unaccountable people making decisions against the grain of what we are trying to achieve on behalf of our constituents. I thank my hon. Friend for raising that point. We are also repatriating the Valuation Office Agency into His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to speed up tax administration. We are abolishing Ofwat and creating a single regulator to cut water pollution. My right hon. Friend the Member for Walsall and Bloxwich will be delighted that we are folding LocatED into the Department for Education to accelerate school building, combining property knowledge with schools’ needs for better value—I urge her to focus her campaign about the free school she referred to on the Secretary of State. We are also repatriating the UK Space Agency into the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. We are taking action on a number of fronts, but that is just the start. We want the body of the state to be accountable to those elected to bring about change and deliver for their constituents. I will briefly set out some of our existing processes that ensure effective arm’s length body accountability. Where possible, robust but fair departmental sponsorship is the key way to ensure clear lines of accountability between the arm’s length bodies and the Department. Those sponsorship arrangements promote regular interaction between bodies and sponsoring Departments to ensure that bodies are held to account for their use of public money and operate in line with the priorities of the Government of the day. I urge right hon. and hon. Friends with concerns about particular bodies to write to the sponsoring Secretary of State about those issues, because ultimately, those arm’s length bodies do have accountability arrangements in place.