As claims to fame go, it is probably not a great one. But I can now claim to be responsible for Michael Gove’s first defeat as chief whip. Yesterday I introduced a very simple bill that would require the Office for Budget Responsibility to audit the major parties’ manifestos. And Gove, maybe concentrating on his other job of minister for television, failed to rally his troops. The Commons gave me permission to bring in the bill by 203 votes to 16.
But the real question here is why the Tories (and the Liberal Democrats, for that matter) are even opposing Labour’s proposals, as encapsulated in my bill. They are a simple, modest, practically cost-free plan, which would add significantly to the transparency of politics and provide a much higher level of public debate in the run-up to the general election. Who knows, maybe it would do a little bit to improve the horribly and consistently low levels of public trust in politics and politicians.
Sometimes in politics we need to acknowledge when our opponents did something right. The OBR is an example of that: back in 2010, Labour questioned whether it was independent enough – it has proved that it is. The OBR is here to stay and has proved itself a valuable addition to the arsenal of government accountability and oversight. Yet, strangely, it is now left to Labour to be the champions of expanding the OBR’s remit, in the face of fierce – if not exactly well organised – Tory opposition.
We are all used to the traditional election-time ding-dong over whose policies have a spending black hole and whose represent a tax bombshell. Wouldn’t a better informed election campaign, with policies audited by an independent body, be a better campaign all round? Wouldn’t it, in fact, lead to better policy-making on the part of all the parties? In a good year, the spending of public money should always be done carefully. Even when times are better than they have been recently, we should think hard about each pound spent in the public’s name. At times like the present, however, when all our constituents have had to face four very difficult years, scrutiny of the spending of public money and taxation becomes all the more important, particularly to those who are the hardest up in our society, who have often worked hard to pay the taxes we collect. The head of the OBR has made it clear that this is something his organisation is perfectly capable of doing – all it takes is the political will to extend the remit so that it can do so.
The Tories seem, inexplicably, determined to put themselves on the wrong side of the argument here. The more they resist this sensible, modest proposal, the more people are going to think there will be something in their manifesto that they fear having the OBR run the rule over.
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Alison McGovern MP is shadow international development minister, a vice-chair of Progress, and member of parliament for Wirral South. She tweets @alison_mcgovern
Well we should hammer them for this from now to the campaign. Why not present our own programme independently to the OBR – or wouldn’t they accept that?
I am far from convinced the OBR is quite as useful as claimed. In its early days the Coalition regularly cited that the OBR had checked its figures and found them OK. As if this made the policies good in themselves. What has to be realised is that the OBR does not have the capacity or remit to challenge the underlying macro-economics of government (or other parties’ for that matter) proposals.
Nor do they have the staff to really challenge proposals. They rely on checking basic methodology of others’ proposals, box-ticking in essence. The mindset is orthodoxy rather than thinking outside the box. You cannot audit creative solutions that involve people, different ways of working etc., so they focus mostly if not exclusively on the money side.
If the Coalition are happy to let this Bill survive a few months, it is not least as it appears to endorse a Coalition way of working, that of claiming legitimacy for what are actually seriously regressive policies.