Watching re-runs of TV's Yes, Minister is both hilarious and sobering, in equal measure – the former because of its farce, and the latter because so little in Whitehall appears to have changed in 25 years. But Yes, Minister is fiction – supposedly. Lord Heseltine, however, is very real, and his appearance last week, at an Audit Commission 25th anniversary event, only confirmed that, unfortunately, in this case, fact and fiction are indistinguishable. The former environment secretary – who created the commission – revealed that if he had not faced so much opposition from Whitehall, it would have been set up much earlier than 1983. The Treasury, in particular, blocked his idea, until he ‘wore it down', for fear that an Audit Commission would end up on the side of councils and become a thorn in its side. Michael Heseltine, as he then was, wound Whitehall up even further at the time, by proposing that the Audit Commission should also monitor central as well as local government spending, an idea swiftly stifled by the mandarins. And so, 25 years later, there is still no similarly-rigorous scrutiny of central government spending, despite reports of Whitehall IT projects that have gone hopelessly over budget or been a litany of incompetence. In a local authority, such scandals would have merited public shaming, dismissal of senior management and even intervention. At last week's event, Lord Heseltine dismissed the power of the Public Accounts Committee, saying it could only look backwards, made no mention of the National Audit Office, and instead suggested that the Audit Commission's work was ‘half done', because it had no power to probe Whitehall spending. The fact is, he said, there is still ‘no effective control' of central government expenditure. Recent coverage of MPs' expenses has highlighted a suspicion that there is one rule for them and another for us, that the bulk of law-abiding taxpayers would be hard-put to get a free ice-cream claimed against tax, let alone kitchens and groceries. Local government has a right to feel the same about central government when it comes to monitoring spending. Let the same scrutiny apply to both, as Lord Heseltine has urged. Michael Burton Editor, The MJ
