Indeed I am, Mr Deputy Speaker, and I am grateful for your guidance. I was just about to conclude my remarks about Shirley Porter by saying that she privatised at will, as well.
In Committee, we heard a lot from the Minister about his commitment to transparency. His Back-Bench colleagues reinforced that point. However, the Bill will make transparency considerably more difficult, because arrangements within local authorities will be considerably more opaque. Transparency International, which my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) quoted, was scathing about the Bill, stating:
“The range of measures outlined in this Bill, combined with recent legislative reforms under the Localism Act 2011, remove key institutional defences against corruption, replacing them with arrangements that are likely to be inadequate to protect the public interest and the public purse.”
We hear a lot from the Government about their concerns for the public purse and the need to ensure that the taxpayer gets value for money, yet it seems that, unless they accept our new clauses, they are being cavalier with the public purse in this case.
I hope that the Minister will reflect on what has been said today. Unless the new auditing arrangements are subject to freedom of information provisions, their opacity will grow. I do not want to strain your patience too much, Mr Deputy Speaker, but circumstances such as the Shirley Porter case will not be uncovered. It is essential that new clause 2, tabled by my hon. Friends the Members for Corby and for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham), is accepted; otherwise private sector audit companies will not be subject to the scrutiny that was previously available under the Audit Commission arrangements. Even when there were external auditors, the information that they held was deemed to be held by the Audit Commission and was therefore subject to
scrutiny by the general public. My hon. Friends and I say that it is important that proper scrutiny is still available under the new arrangements. As we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Corby, local enterprise partnerships are now also spending considerable sums of money.