Six and a half years ago, Eric Pickles, a Conservative Minister in the recently elected coalition Government called on all of us to keep an eye on how public money was being spent by our Council and raise any concerns with our Councillors. His words continue to adorn the Government website “The Secretary of State said a new wave of local scrutiny by citizen journalists, microbloggers and armchair auditors – what he labelled his ‘citizen samizdat’ – was a triumph and encouraged councils to welcome them into the world of local government finance.” This rather blew up in his face when he was forced to publish how much money his own department spent on biscuits and there have been many other times since when the Government has shown itself to be incompetent in the way it spends  our money. In order to hold people like Mr Pickles who sits in the House of Lords and our MPs to account demands time and effort. Watching the Parliament Channel involves spending hours in front of the TV. Thankfully there is an alternative that is available online. A charity called ‘They Work for You’ operates a system which takes the daily transcripts from the Houses of Parliament, and turns them into a much more accessible structure. Every MP and Lord who speaks can be followed, simply by registering their name on the ‘They work for You’ website. Each time a named person speaks, an email is sent to the people who registers with them. The same is true if keywords are mentioned such as the name of a location, or an organisation or indeed almost any other word. I was Chair of a couple of local charities that were part of a national network, both of which shared the same name as their network and so I registered the name and every time one of the networks was mentioned I sent an email to the person thanking them for their contribution, assuming I agreed with it. I currently have registered words such as Sussex, Brighton and Hove on the site along with the names of all 16 Sussex MPs and several Lords who are connected with our area. Every so often a debate which involves a local MP takes place and the contributions can be very interesting. I then blog about them or occasionally write a piece in the Argus newspaper as I have done today.

At the beginning of last week Stephen Lloyd, the MP for Eastbourne asked a question in a debate on the subject of Carillion “How many profit warnings does a major company have to issue before this Government decide that they will probably not award it major and significant contracts—more than three, perhaps?” The answer to this was not particularly interesting, however a Labour MP who asked a subsequent question got a much more telling response. His question was “Carillion is notorious in the subcontracting industry as a company that pays its bills very late—over 90 days in most cases. The Minister has talked about public sector contractors that will need to be paid, but what support will the Government give small business in the north-east and elsewhere that are in non-Government contracts and are still waiting to be paid?”

One wonders if David Liddington, the Minister at the despatch box for this debate even knows that  the Governments has a scheme called Prompt Payment which is an attempt to pressurise businesses who win contracts with the Government to pay their suppliers within 30 days as his response was “Companies in non-Government contracts that are not involved in the provision of public services would become creditors of Carillion. The responsibility of the Government and the use of taxpayers’ money should be first and foremost for protecting the delivery of key public services and the employees who deliver those services.” Thankfully since that debate the Government has changed its mind and chosen to extend its support to businesses that supplied products and services to Carillion. However there are other businesses like Carillion who gain Government contracts and then act as a buffer between the Government and the work being carried out. I work for a company that has worked for several of these large contractors and I don’t believe these sort of arrangements offer taxpayers value for money. In the short term managing more contracts would demand more effort and cost from the Government, but they would then eliminate costs from within the large contractor so the costs should balance out. This would then enable them to be more in control of the projects. However for as long as the Government only wants to deal with large organisations, they must ensure that subcontractors are protected from any failings by the main contractor, and are paid on time!

Bizarrely despite the image above there is no listing for Carillion as one of the signatories on the Prompt Payment website although it appears that they did sign up but did so stating that their payment terms were 120 days so 4 months rather than the 1 month that the Government claims it its priority.