My Lords, I join others in declaring membership of the LGA vice-presidential mafia. I am also a member of Newcastle City Council’s audit committee. I strongly support my noble friend’s amendment, as did the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, a former leader of Newcastle City Council who, alas, is not in his place.
I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Tope, on the ingenuity with which he has contrived some wriggle room to justify supporting the Government this afternoon as opposed to doing what the noble Lord, Lord Shipley,
would perhaps have done had he been here and opposing them, but I do not think his arguments carry very much weight. He is particularly concerned about the cost of these matters, but the audit is carried out on these services whether they are provided as of now by the local authority or by an external body. There ought to be a level playing field in that respect in any event so that there will be a cost of proper auditing by the district auditor and it should not add to the burden that is currently experienced.
The argument that the noble Lord adduces about the need to assess the situation is perfectly fair, but of course it is provided for in the amendment. One could argue that my noble friend has been excessively generous in saying that the review should take place after five years. It may be that a shorter period will be short enough to assess the functioning of the system and, if there is still a question as to the costs, the costs. However, the principle of my noble friend’s amendment is clearly right.
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The noble Lord, Lord Palmer, raised at the Report stage the issue of the contractual aspect and he raised it again today. I do not think that gets away from the thrust of my noble friend’s amendment, which is to endeavour to ensure that these matters are properly looked at by the district auditor and that the district auditor’s findings are disclosable subject to the proviso that he has included about commercial confidentiality and freedom of information. We have to remember the context in which this debate takes place. We have had the glaring and shocking examples of Group 4 and Serco recently in the public domain. Those were large national contracts. I wonder whether the questions of the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, about access to the documentation and the contracts might not be addressed to central government if that is a real concern. Certainly, they do not seem to have taken steps of the kind that the noble Lord indicated in relation to the problems that have been faced by those organisations.
They are not the only ones where considerable difficulty has been experienced, vast expense incurred and failures or inadequacies of service detected across a range of public services. Again one thinks of Serco’s contract with National Health Service England about out-of-hours care in Cornwall and a range of other matters of that kind. There had been systemic failure and it was clearly necessary for the audit service—in this case the district audit service—to have a role and for transparency to be the order of the day.
I am not sure whether the noble Lord or the noble Baroness will be the Minister replying—it will be the noble Lord shouldering this burden manfully as he replies to the debate. I hope that he can give some assurances of the kind suggested by my noble friend. I cannot see that the Government would emerge with anything but credit for accepting the amendment in the interests of transparency, in the interests of proper scrutiny of what happens, and ultimately of procuring value for money and saving money for the public purse.