A little love song to the National Audit Office

This Christmas, hug your loved ones. But hug your viable constitutional institutions closer.

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There is a little organisation in the heart of Westminster which does the Lord's work. No-one really cares about it. It has one of those names which is so boring that it seems to physically obstruct the human brain from paying attention to it. But very quietly, it gets on with things and reminds us of how politics should work. It is the National Audit Office (NAO).

Case in point. On Wednesday, a new NAO report was released called Increasing the Capacity of the Prison Estate to Meet Demand. Yes, the titles of the report are also very boring, just like the name of the organisation. But inside, it is a crime story that is almost flamboyant in its excess. We encounter the scene of the transgression. Blood everywhere, covering the walls, dripping from the ceiling. And then our hero gets incredibly stabby with the person responsible. No mercy. No restrain. Just stab stab stab. This is what the NAO report does to the Conservative's reputation in government. It reduces it to a twitching wreck, about to breathe its last.

What has happened? The prison estate has been operating at close to full capacity since autumn 2022. If it reaches capacity, the whole criminal justice system would start to collapse. Courts could not try cases where suspects could be given prison sentences. That's game over right there. It is effectively the legalisation of crime. In policy terms, it is apocalyptic.

Why did this happen? Because the Conservative government failed. It failed at an epic scale. The expansion of the prison estate was subject to "overambitious timelines and unachievable budgets". They didn't secure planning permission. They approved unrealistic deadlines. The progress reports were inaccurate. They did not understand the scope of their own programmes.

Importantly, they did not understand, or even seek to understand, the way that policies introduced in one part of government would affect those in another. So for instance the previous government wanted more police officers. People generally do. But here's the thing: having more police officers means you'll probably catch more criminals, which means you'll often end up sending more people to jail, which means you'll need free cells or a larger estate. And yet they were too ignorant of the connection between policies to recognise this fact. The hand does not know what its own arse is doing.

The same is true for the 'tough on crime' mantra, which the previous government promoted. Fine. Be tough on crime. Whatever. Governments have been speaking this pointless horseshit forever and I can't see them stopping anytime spoon. But they must at least recognise that it will entail more people in prison, which means we'll need more prison places. We should expect their recognition of this fact as the bare minimum. And yet successive Conservative governments pushed this agenda while under-investing in the prison estate, and often actually cutting the Ministry of Justice budget. As the NAO said: "The current crisis in the prison estate is a consequence of previous governments' failure to align criminal justice policies with funding for the prison estate, leading to reactive solutions which represent poor value for money."

The report is a damning indictment of one of the worst periods of governance we've ever lived through. But it is also a warning for Labour. Most of all, it is a story about a lack of coherence, about governments which promise all sorts of disparate things to respond to different political pressures without assessing how those things affect one another. "Until there is greater coherence between the government’s wider policy agenda and funding for its prison estate," the report says, "the current crisis position will not represent value for money."

The report really couldn't be clearer about culpability. The prison crisis is the fault of the previous government. This made no difference to the Daily Mail, of course, which this morning insisted that "Labour's prison release scheme could see criminals let out early for YEARS". Or the Daily Express, which said that "Labour's early prison release plan" was "smoke and mirrors". Or Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat, who disingenuously asked: "In what world is releasing 20,000 criminals onto our streets a good idea?" Well, very much the world you made when you persistently fucked up in government, Thomas.

But if there’s anyone left out there who does still care about what is real, the NAO is an invaluable resource.

What is this organisation? Where did it come from, how does it work, and what are its priorities. Earlier this week, Henry Midgley, Laurence Ferry and Aileen D Murphie published a history and analysis of the NAO, which sought to answer these questions. it’s called Holding Government to Account: Democracy and the National Audit Office. I accept that the mainstream market for this type of publication may be small, but the story it tells is a rather beautiful one. The word ‘audit’ sounds dry and lifeless. It conceals a fierce battle over political power.

The basic dynamic in British political history was the control of money. The monarch had power, but parliament had the purse. Kings could dismiss parliament for as long as they liked, but eventually they'd want another war, so they'd have to revive it in order to introduce a new tax. After the Glorious Revolution, parliament insisted that the monarch submit their plans for taxation and expenditure to the Commons for annual approval.

In the Victorian period, William Gladstone embedded that system in place by introducing a comptroller and auditor general at the head of an Exchequer and Audit Office. They would bring a sense of enforcement to the principle of parliamentary control - checking the purposes of the money going to the Treasury and ensuring it was being spent in accordance with parliament's intentions.

In 1983, it was replaced with the NAO. It kept its original responsibilities of scrutinising government power and took on a new formal responsibility for investigating waste. It would now report directly to the Commons. A long slow process of growing parliamentary power, which lasted for around 500 years, had come to its natural conclusion.

The way it works now is this: The NAO has two responsibilities. First, it audits the government's accounts - financial records of everything it spent, owes and owns. Second, it assesses the value for money of public services - looking at how it is spending money, what it's trying to achieve, and how that's all going. It's this second part that's most useful from a journalistic point of view.

I always breathe a sigh of relief when I find an NAO report on a subject I'm researching.

They are transparent. They are concise. They are laser-focused by their exclusive concern on financial matters rather than political implications.

They're written in an exquisite way - in plain language, with a predictable layout, working according to a clear logic. They are never excessive, but at the same time they are never euphemistic or overly polite either. Some of their reports are utterly damning in a way that cannot be achieved through outright condemnation, but only by the cool-headed unemotional laying out of facts. The report on Rwanda, for instance, is basically cold-hearted murder.

They are really rather beautiful things, of the sort which we rarely appreciate. They're the product of years of hard-fought for constitutional change. They are the kind of literature which a sophisticated political society produces, so that it can govern itself more effectively. They deserve a level of respect which we do not currently give them

But these reports only work where the political culture around them actually gives a damn. They rely on journalists and politicians bothering to read them, or at least skimming the executive summary. They rely on publications acknowledging that they exist and that their conclusions provide a final word on what is really happening.

This week's report on prisons demonstrates conclusively, if it weren't clear already, where responsibility for the current crisis lies. Coverage of the prisons story should be grounded in what it has concluded, rather than the party political machinations of the right-wing press. And that goes both ways. If an NAO report comes out in a year’s time attacking Labour for stumbling in its response, that should be treated with the respect it deserves by Keir Starmer’s supporters.

But perhaps today, as we start the festive season, we can just be grateful for the things we have. We should hug our loved ones. That includes our family, sure. But more importantly it includes all the lovely auditing mechanisms which we most rely on for our continued constitutional health. It's in these small little details, these tiny granular micro-institutions, that we can still find pride in Britain's way of doing things.

The new book on the NAO is available here. You really should get a copy. I know what you’re thinking, that it's a step too far. It's a form of nerdery that's just a bit too extreme for your taste. It's like escalating from amphetamine to crack. But we both know that's not true. Look where you are in life. Look what you're reading. You signed up to this newsletter. You're not well. Accept your inevitable fate.