The letter is written in very diplomatic language. There are quite a number of points in it which are hard-hitting in the language of diplomacy. However, given the current position of the country there needs to be something more direct said, such that it is very difficult for the members of committee to identify the value for money in the output statements. I suspect we do not have a way of ascertaining what it costs Departments to produce the output statements.
The process so far has been a joke in some ways. I gave the example of one of the early examples the committee received which was about quality bus corridors. As everybody knows, in many of the quality bus corridors the time taken to travel has gone back rather than forward. It is meaningless unless it is linked with the provision of buses, for instance. We were given this glowing report where all the boxes were ticked — a bit like the health of our financial institutions where the regulator managed to find no technical problem with solvency issues in any of the financial institutions but none the less, we were told they were collapsing.
This kind of output statement is part of a trend in public service reports which sheds very little light on the process. I agree with the contents of the letter but at some point earlier in it there should be a very clear statement that members of the Select Committee on Finance and the Public Service have found them to add very little value to the process of examining Government expenditure. As the report said, it may well be that in other countries where a culture has been built up they are valuable compared to the ones we have seen so far.
This year the difficulty has increased. On budget day, we were given Estimates for 2009. We had Estimates for the rest of the year between 14 October and 31 December 2008. We have no mechanism for linking the two. It makes the Estimates for 2009 particularly unknowable as to whether they are meaningful at all. The format and the theory behind them remains good but they are not providing any insight and evaluation of Government accounting. It is almost impossible to use them in any meaningful way.