Pot plants, Bob Neill and the curious decision to close the Audit Commission
Posted by Christie Malry on August 24, 2010 at 11:14 am
On Monday morning, the Today programme carried a jovial interview with Michael O'Higgins, Chairman of the Audit Commission, the body that seeks to ensure that local authorities and some bits of the NHS are getting value for money and which is about to be axed by the Conservatives. Why? Well, because Eric Pickles, the man who ate all the pies (probably at our expense) and who was booed by an angry Question Time crowd for claiming that he had to have a second home a mere 37 miles from London, doesn't like them. He wasn't available to explain himself, so he sent Bob Neill, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of Communities and Local Government, to do his dirty work.
Neill made a total hash of it. Even Ritchie thought he was talking complete nonsense. His argument was that the Audit Commission spends lots on bagels and pot plants and that it's outrageous that those costs have to be absorbed by the public sector when paying for audit contracts. So he supports outsourcing audits to the private sector, who - incidentally - also tend to pay for food when having clients to visit at lunch times and have pot plants in their offices. So, in exactly the same way, they will absorb the costs of those expenses into the fees they charge. His inability to grasp this fundamental point while floundering around trying to criticise the Commission made him sound as stupid and out of touch as many Labour ministers did in Labour's last term. Quite an achievement.
His coup-de-grace, though, was to suggest that the Audit Commission might be floated off as a mutual organisation. Er, Bob. We already have a great deal of mutual organisations operating in the audit market. Each of the Big Four firms is owned by its partners. Did he even get a briefing prior to the interview?
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