Given massive pressure on national finances, the public won’t trust the official cost of HS2
The public accounts committee (PAC) report into HS2 exposes the Department for Transport’s lack of transparency with Parliament and the public. This further undermines public confidence that HS2 is necessary or subject to accountable governance. This is shocking and unacceptable, but hardly comes as a surprise. It is sadly not untypical of other public projects of all sizes. In this case, however, the prevarication was blatant. When Bernadette Kelly, the permanent secretary, was asked by PAC if the project was still on budget as recently as May 2019, she confirmed that it was. We now know that this was far from the truth. Given the enormous pressure on public expenditure due to
Covid-19, people will question just how trustworthy the Government’s current estimates for the cost of HS2 are, and whether this is value for money. Why do senior officials hold back factual truths from Parliament? This is of fundamental importance, because if there is a lack of external transparency, it is almost certain there is a lack of internal transparency. If the truth is not being told to power, decisions are being made on limited or faulty information. That is why holding back the truth undermines public confidence so seriously. Yet it keeps happening.
The Government’s accountability to Parliament is much more complicated than it appears. Constitutionally, the doctrine of accountability was laid down by the 1918 Haldane Report. PAC is the longest established select committee, predating Haldane. It has accounting officers not ministers as witnesses. This is reflected in Haldane, which first mooted the idea of a select committee for every department: witnesses would have to give full information to such committees, “and for this purpose it would be requisite that ministers, as well as the officers of Departments, should appear before them to explain and defend the acts for which they were responsible”.
It has however become axiomatic that some civil servants, like Bernadette Kelly, today’s transport permanent secretary, should be directly accountable to Parliament for the administration of government money. But when we haul officials over the coals, is it really for “acts for which they were responsible”?
Seventy years after Haldane, the then cabinet secretary wrote the 1985 Armstrong Memorandum, which emphasised that the civil service has “no constitutional personality or responsibility separate from the duly constituted Government of the day”.
He wrote that when a civil servant gives evidence to a select committee “the ultimate responsibility lies with Ministers, and not with civil servants, to decide what information should be made available”. Of course Bernadette knew that HS2 was running late and over budget in 2019, but (as our report acknowledges) ministers had not yet decided how to proceed. This meant she felt bound to hold the line laid down by ministers. Moreover, as those working at that level know, even the permanent secretary is briefed and prepped subject to the oversight of ministers and their political advisers.
So we must acknowledge how often senior civil servants find themselves in this trap: knowing far more than they have been sanctioned to disclose.
We need an open discussion to develop a new understanding between Parliament, ministers and civil servants about how scrutiny and accountability should work. We don’t expect civil servants to express political views, but Whitehall must develop ways for officials to be open and honest about the actual facts.
Sir Bernard Jenkin MP (Conservative) is a member of the public accounts committee and nominated to be chairman of the Commons liaison committee