ABSTRACT
Aside from this limited opportunity, any control which parliament exercises is through the control of policy and the normal parliamentary mechanisms for the scrutiny of government policy and administration. Griffith and Ryle sum up the supply procedure as follows:
The House has largely abandoned all opportunities for direct control of public expenditure by means of debate and vote on the estimates presented to the House. Except on the three Estimates Days, there is no opportunity to amend or negative any of the individual estimates, and the government secures formal approval for its expenditure, without debate, in three or four block votes each year. In place of formal direct control by Voting Supply, which for many years has become theoretical, the House has increasingly relied on informal indirect control through the exercise of its influence on policy, through scrutiny of policy, administration and expenditure by departmentally related select committees and by ex post facto scrutiny of actual spending by the Public Accounts Committee. [2003, pp 357-58]
As the Public Accounts Committee Report to the House in 1987 admits, ‘Parliament’s consideration of annual estimates – the key constitutional control – remains largely a formality’.43 The Public Accounts Committee was established in 1861, for the purpose of examining accounts of departments following the submission of reports from the National Audit Office. The work of the Audit Office and the Committee and recent reforms are considered in Chapter 16.
