Managing Public Money And Parliamentary Accountability

EDM number 1007 in 2008-09, proposed by Paul Flynn on 09/03/2009.
Categorised under the topic of Nuclear power.

That this House is concerned at the demonstrable misapplication of rules by the right hon. Member for Croydon North and officials in the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform in reporting to Parliament arrangements for the indemnification of the new top management tier for the Sellafield nuclear plant; notes the guidelines for such reporting are contained in the Treasury document, Managing Public Money; further notes that the procedure for informing Parliament invoked by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform included section A.5.5.28 of Annexe 5.5 on Liabilities which reads `Sometimes it is not possible to give details of a contingent liability with full transparency. In such cases the department should write to the chairs of both the PAC and departmental committee to provide the same details as those outlined in paragraph A.5.5.24'; further notes that paragraph A.5.5.30 points out that departments may also want to report a contingent liability at less than 14 days before the end of the session, and that in such cases the contingent liability `should only go live after lying before Parliament during 14 sitting days, i.e. some days after the start of the next session'; agrees with the foreword that states `Nor should anything in this document discourage the application of sheer common sense'; and believes that the joint memorandum dated 29 January 2009 by HM Treasury and the Department published at page 16 of evidence to the Public Accounts Committee's Fifth Report, Session 2008-09, is demonstrably inaccurate, and thus the current insurance arrangements for Sellafield remain invalid.

This motion has been signed by a total of 20 MPs.