Speeches by Lowe.

“I think that is a very good question, Chair, because I do not understand why we do not just let these gilts run off. If the Bank of England is getting a payment from the Treasury for making the decision that you say is theirs, surely, if the Treasury is paying the losses, it should be the Treasury’s decision, not the B…”

“If I can just very quickly come in on that subject, I understood that the Treasury has given a guarantee to the Bank of England so that any losses that the Bank of England suffers are paid by the Treasury. Is that right?”

“Radley.”

“From an Abingdon boy.”

“It’s two-tiered, Geoffrey.”

“How does that square with a briefing we had this week that said that the Government do not know how much they are spending on external consultants? They do not have a washboard of who they spend the money with, and they do not know how much they are spending. How does that feed into OSCAR II correctly?”

“My opinion is that OSCAR II basically understates our liabilities and overstates our assets. I think to some extent it is delusional. If you put nonsense data in, you get nonsense data out. If we are feeding all this nonsense data into OSCAR II, how confident are you that we actually do know the financial position of U…”

“Thank you. While we have got the supremo of OSCAR II here—the man who drives the national assets and liabilities—I have a bugbear, and this “rubbish in, rubbish out” point plays into it. As I understand it, this feeds up into OSCAR II, so the Whole of Government Accounts will be a subset of what goes into OSCAR II.”

“But 4% have audited accounts, Conrad.”

“At least you would have accurate data, because most of them do have audited accounts—in fact, all of them do. They have to.”

“I know what it is, but if you put rubbish in at the bottom, you get rubbish out at the top. It is a bit like these local councils—it is a very good question. If you amalgamate all the local councils that are all a mess, you just get one big mess.”

“Yes, but for your individual companies—”

“I am still struggling to see, but again, what it bears out to me is the complete separation between the private sector and the public sector. This would not be the way in the private sector. If I ran a public company or a private company with an audit report like this, I would end up in prison, probably.”

“No doubt you would be here for another reason.”

“So we don’t know what the exact cost is. When we look at ’23-24 where, to Chris’s point, you made some aspirational statements, it does not seem that we have made the progress that we hoped to make, and today we have heard more aspirations. I just question how this Committee will know you are going to make the progress…”

“I am a new MP, and I am also new on the Public Accounts Committee. I have attended four or five of these meetings now. I read in the NAO audit report that “of the 407 English Local Authorities that should have submitted audited data to the WGA, 167 (41%) did not submit data…and a further 224 (55%) submitted data that w…”

“Will the Minister now commit to publishing these figures on a regular and transparent basis, or will I have to continue exposing this? Further whistleblowers have already come forward with additional information, and I thank them for that. My warning to the Home Office and to other Departments is this: be very careful …”

“indicated assent.”

“I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, and I will indeed write to the Committee. I have one final question for the Minister: what else is the Home Office lying about?”

“I can count, thank you. Why did the Minister mislead the British people? Who is being sacked?”