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Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill

My Lords, I found it difficult to believe that this was being required of us today. Amendment 21 requires each public authority’s reported fraud rates annually, employing a rigorous audit and sampling comparably statistically robust methods. That assumes that public authorities are not running any systems whatever themselves. The whole principle of government is that you do not do everything centrally, from central government, but you pass some things down to the individual public authorities.

For many years, I served as the chairman of the audit committee on the London Borough of Barnet, where we rigorously looked at spending proposals, as I imagine do all public authorities. The amendment says that the public authority must

“register each relevant spending scheme or programme … before the start of each financial year”.

It is meant to be for those exceeding £100 million annually, but for most schemes from public authorities—think of the new railways, for example—the figures never stack up by the time you get to the end of the programme. If it is expected that they will have to identify them at the beginning of the programme, numerous exceptions will be found to those programmes.

This amendment does not hold water. It takes away from all the public authorities the authority and vigilance that they are meant to assume themselves. We cannot support this amendment.