UK Parliament / Open data

European Union (Amendment) Bill

I am not affected by whether my erstwhile noble friend moved his amendment for particular reasons; he has provided an opportunity for others to ask questions. I am going to ask one which, frankly, somewhat embarrasses me, but has been prompted by listening to the debate today. Twenty years ago, I was on the Budget Council and the Minister responsible for just about everything in the Treasury that came in the housekeeping category—I was the only one of the eight Ministers who served in the Treasury, during my time, who had never worked in the City. Whether it was thought that I understood the outside world I do not know; it was certainly thought that I might be usefully employed on matters which were not related to the City. The then Treasury, under my noble friend Lord Lawson, introduced a special unit to assist the rest of government with issues of purchasing and procurement. I can recall driving to see the Court of Auditors, after a Budget Council meeting, through a profound fog—climatically apposite to the subject we were looking at. I recall being told on that occasion that I was the first president of the Budget Council who had ever visited the Court of Auditors; that is a little alarming since 1986 was some 29 years after the foundation of the Community. The question I want to ask relates to the second unit, for which I was responsible, in relation to procurement and purchasing. As we set that up, we recruited able people from the private sector to come and look at how government entities were handling the ordinary efficiencies of their job. One young man had taken an interest in the costs that were being incurred by the storage of commodities under the CAP and related matters. He realised that the storage was being charged and costed at a rate which was rising in line with the retail price index. He took the trouble to go down and visit the various storage contractors around the country and was very struck by the ubiquity of BMWs in their car parks. As a consequence, he made further inquiries into what the ordinary movement of costs in the storage industry were and discovered that we were going through a happy technological period where the costs were going vertically downward. I am not going to go any further into that issue. I have made the important points about it. What interests me—it embarrasses me that I did not ask the question at the time— is how far there is a system for communication and collation within the Union, either at the level of the Commission, or at the level of the Court of Auditors under which good practice in individual countries is reported on and thereby reflected in other countries within the Union.
Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
701 c1043-4 
Session
2007-08
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords chamber
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