My Lords, we are sympathetic to my noble friend’s amendments and supportive of the intention behind them, which is to improve transparency in the new arrangements for local government. As I said in Committee, these open up a very important area of discussion.
Freedom of information legislation has played an important part in opening up government to the public. With some local authorities now outsourcing large portions of their services to firms such as Capita, questions must be asked about how to hold such firms accountable, given the significant amounts of public money that they now manage; for example, some councils will be handing over control of critical council services such as planning, licensing and environmental health to private, for-profit companies. This will make it harder for local residents to get answers and action on issues affecting them. It will also make it harder for elected councillors to monitor and scrutinise these services on behalf of local people. It will make it almost impossible to change services if councillors and residents decide that they want things done differently. My noble friend and others have mentioned the G4S and Serco revelations of last week, which have rightly caused much outrage. We have called for freedom of information legislation to be extended to the delivery of public services by the private sector in order to give greater accountability and transparency.
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This Bill may well mean that there is a small coterie of large auditors that take the lion’s share of public auditing duties. These firms have multiple relationships with authorities. They provide other consulting and advisory services, and it is understandable that concerns would be raised about perceptions of conflict of interest or actual conflicts of interest.
My noble friend’s amendment raises a range of questions, and I look forward to the Minister’s reply. In particular, will he agree that there needs to be a public right to information to ensure that the auditing of tens of billions of pounds of public money is beyond reproach? Does he agree that auditors must be able to look at how private companies spend the billions of pounds of public money that they are currently handed to perform outsourced services? Finally, does the Minister not believe that where companies are propped up by huge contracts such as G4S and Serco, the public should be able to hold them to account and that the public, above all else, have a right to know where their money goes?