Schedule 6 - Codes of audit practice and guidance

Part of Local Audit and AccountabilityBill [Lords] – in a Public Bill Committee at 2:00 pm on 12 November 2013.

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Photo of Andy Sawford Andy Sawford Shadow Minister (Communities and Local Government) 2:00, 12 November 2013

We wanted to compliment the official who drafted the schedule. I encourage the Minister to ask them to cast their eye over the rest of the Bill in the same spirit: it may even have been the Minister who did it. The schedule is clear and defines its terms well. It is prescriptive where that is helpful, in the interest of the Bill’s objective of securing independent and thorough auditing of relevant authorities, but it has an appropriately light touch in places.

It is welcome that paragraph 6(1), headed “Publication of code”, states:

“A code of audit practice may be published in such manner as the Comptroller and Auditor General thinks fit.”

That is one occasion where the Secretary of State has not thought fit to make himself the public relations officer for the public audit organisations.

It is right that a Bill should not be prescriptive about how a notice may be published. We urge the Minister to consult the official who drafted the provisions—a person of great sense and good judgment—and to think about whether such a simple form of words would be much more appropriate at all the places in the Bill where the Government have been over-prescriptive about PR, with which they seem obsessed.

Will the Minister explain what the code will cover? The schedule sets out how it will be developed and may be published, to whom it may apply, and who will be consulted. All those things are important and welcome. However, the code of audit practice and guidance will be important in addressing such points as have been made by my hon. Friends the Members for City of Durham and for Derby North about the framework of public audit, and we envisage that that may form part of the code. Broadly what areas does the Minister envisage it will cover, given its significance?