Speeches by Lowe.

“Well, they are generating their own money. They are not just spending.”

“I am finding it very enlightening to learn about these small Government bodies. Given that we are looking at only bodies that spent up to £30 million with up to 50 employees, I think it is fair to say that we are looking at the tip of the iceberg rather than the base of the iceberg, which is what sank the Titanic. I ha…”

“Are you collectively comfortable that enough is being done to take full advantage of shared services, or is there more you can do?”

“Who is driving that? Who is responsible for that? In my experience, unless someone is responsible, nothing ever happens.”

“That does not entirely tally with the pre-meeting we had with the Departments, but we can—”

“You just mentioned accounts packages. I find that if my companies are all on the same accounts package it is much easier for everybody to understand what is happening everywhere. Are you all on the same accounts package? It sounds as if you are not.”

“So you are on different ones?”

“So it is funded by the taxpayer who is giving you money that you are then spending. Let us get the term right: it is not turnover; it is spend. On payroll, auditing, office and communications—loads of things that, if you run a business, you try and ensure that you spend as little as possible on—what are you all doing t…”

“From other parts of Government?”

“Yes. On your shared services, you said that you have an audit and presumably you use different auditors. When you talk about turnover, I am assuming that a lot of what is going through your various bodies is spend rather than turnover?”

“So captive recovery?”

“We can pick that up later. Having had the pre-meeting, if I ran a business where I knew what my income was and I was just spending money—again, I think a lot of this is Government money being given to these various small quangos, as I call them—the question is about the sustainability of the financial reporting. Is it …”

“It is similar to a small company not needing an audit.”

“And then can we judge whether they are up to the job?”

“I have seen that there is a White Paper, but when will we actually have a firm structure so that everybody knows what is happening? I think that Ofwat is dysfunctional, that DEFRA is dysfunctional, that the Environment Agency is dysfunctional—I do not know about the Drinking Water Inspectorate. Put those all together a…”

“I am not blaming you, as you have been there for only a nanosecond. What I mean is the history of it. I would not blame you, as you have not been there long enough.”

“We need this structure and the people as soon as possible. It does not fill me with great confidence to hear that a whole load of legislation has to be passed first. That sounds like a long time to me.”

“If I could just ask you a top-down question, I am a great lover of Victorian Britain, and Victorian Britain believed that water and power—clean water and cheap power—should be in public ownership, even though it was far more capitalist than we are today. Listening to the debate and reading these papers, do you think th…”

“I know the structure. But intellectually, do you think that water companies would often be better? I listen to this conversation and I have concerns that the skill and knowledge base both within the civil service and within the ministerial pool—which I look at with horror—is not capable of actually holding the public’s…”

“Those are fine words—thank you for them—but when will we actually know what the structure is and who will populate that structure?”