Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I endorse my hon. Friend's tentative concerns and shall start where he finished—on the extent to which international bodies look to the NAO as a beacon of light in the scrutiny of public expenditure. I have personal experience of the issue from my time on the Public Accounts Committee and, latterly, as a governor of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy. We have entered the Westminster Consortium, a relationship with several other parties that are involved in parliamentary strengthening, and one of them is the NAO. Earlier today, we had an away-day to talk about how we can do more, working together, to spread best practice from this Parliament to other Parliaments throughout the world. It is very valuable work, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Department for International Development and Governments throughout the world recognise it as such. Although we may think that we are dealing with legislation in isolation, we should not forget that others will look at and, perhaps, imitate the structures that we are putting in place to provide for the NAO's corporate governance over, I hope, the next decades. In that context, it is right that we raise concerns about the proposal. I do not have concerns in principle, because they were well addressed earlier in the debate by my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee. However, we must recognise that, essentially, we are introducing a corporate governance structure to an entity that is not a corporate: it is an entity with a chief executive, in the form of the Comptroller and Auditor General, who quite rightly has enshrined in statute a degree of independence and autonomy in terms of his work on audit and value for money, as my hon. Friend and the right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams), the Chairman of the Public Accounts Commission clearly explained.