Feargal Quinn (Independent)

I welcome the Minister of State to the House and I welcome the opportunity to have this debate. It is the right time for it.

On the Independent Newspapers website there is currently a straw poll that asks the question: "Is the Government incompetent when it comes to spending public money?" I am sure the Minister of State would have no doubt as to how he would answer that. As of a few minutes ago, the public response to that question was quite clear. No fewer than 86.4% of those who have already responded consider that the Government is indeed incompetent. I am sorry to reveal that to the Minister of State as, particularly on a night like this, it would not put a smile on anybody's face.

Without wanting to read too much into an informal survey of this kind, the question it asks is nevertheless pertinent to this debate. I suggest that, as legislators, it is the most important question we have to ask and it is one we should be asking constantly. In response to this question there is good news and bad news. I recently heard someone who had given his son the loan of his car tell a story about hearing good and bad news. His son telephoned him and told him he had good and bad news, asking which he wanted to hear first. His father replied that he wanted to hear the good news first. The good news, he was told, was that the airbag works.

The good news is in the report before us, namely, the annual report of the National Development Finance Agency. The bad news is in another publication that has just seen the light of day, the annual report of the Comptroller and Auditor General. First, the good news. I commend the work of the National Development Finance Agency and I commend the Government on its decision last year to extend its remit so that it now takes care of all State procurement under public private partnerships. The setting up of the agency in the first place and the extension of its remit are an acknowledgement — a belated acknowledgement but a welcome one nonetheless — that the raising of development finance is a matter for experts, and not one for amateurs. This is a field ploughed by some of the cleverest minds — certainly some of the highest-paid minds — in the financial world. To set that brainpower up on one side, and to attempt to compete with it on equal terms with a team of non-experts with no particular training in this highly specialised field was to guarantee a losing result for the State from the start. Now, at least, we have a level playing field with a balance of expertise on both sides.

The evidence from the first few years of the NDFA's existence is that it has brought about a huge increase in the value for money the State gets as a result of its activities in raising development finance. On the basis of that record, I have no doubt that it will make the same improvements in the area of public private partnerships, which perhaps have a lot to offer us in terms of delivering necessary infrastructural projects somewhat faster and more efficiently than we have been used to on the basis of direct State involvement. I say "perhaps" because I think the jury is still out on the issue of public private partnerships. It remains to be seen whether they can be worth the extra that they certainly cost.

I see the off-loading of this responsibility to the NDFA as a continuation of the trend that created the National Treasury Management Agency more than ten years ago and the steady expansion of its remit ever since. The NTMA is a monument to a principle that I should like to see extended to all public spending in this country. This principle is that the spending of public money is a serious matter, and one to which we must bring the very highest standards of professional management. In one way I am amazed that I should have to state this principle at all because it is surely self-evident. Self-evident or not, it is not a principle that we have acted on in the past across the broad spectrum of public spending.

We now look after the national debt in a highly professional way, and thanks to the NDFA, we are now taking the same approach with the raising of development capital. However, despite the large amounts of money we are now raising for development capital, it is a fairly small amount of overall Government spending. The truth is that for the majority of Government spending across all Departments our attitude as to how we spend money is, to put it charitably, lackadaisical. One does not have to rely on my opinion to come to that conclusion. Instead, all one has to do is read the annual report of the Comptroller and Auditor General. There, in black and white, one will be able to read all the chapter and verse that one could ever want. This is the bad news to which I referred earlier.

I will not waste the time of the House by reciting any of the latest glaring instances of misspending and bad value for money, not least because it is the subject of the Private Members' debate in the other House this week. What I want to do is call attention to the pointlessness of the annual charade we go through in vetting State expenditure after the event. The first stage in that charade is the excellent work of the Comptroller and Auditor General and his staff which results in the publication of his annual report. The second stage is the chorus of "oohs" and "aahs" thrown up by the media at the latest manifestation of gross misspending. The third and longest stage of the charade is the weekly grind of the Committee of Public Accounts, which diligently works its way through the voluminous Comptroller and Auditor General report questioning all the responsible Accounting Officers on their stewardship.

What happens at the end of this long charade which takes up the best part of a year? What is changed as a result of it all? Nothing at all changes is the short, shocking answer. When the charade is over, there is a deafening silence and a total lack of remedial action. By then it is almost time to start the cycle all over again for the following year.

I may be considered unkind in calling all this work by so many hard-working people a charade, but if we take no action as a result of it that is exactly what it is. As legislators we are the audience for this performance, and it has no effect whatever on what we do. The only purpose of unveiling all these instances of misspending is to do something about it. The whole thing is pointless if we do not take action. That is the purpose of what we do——