What are the prospects for Margaret Hodge at the PAC?

The country’s most powerful public spending watchdog has a new chairman in Margaret Hodge. The former PwC consultant has been controversial as both a council leader and government minister in the past. Will she be equally high-profile as she supervises the audit of government departments?

What’s happened?

With a change in government comes a similar clear out of the Parliamentary select committee staff. The old chairmen step down and new ones come in. This time was the inaugural outing for elections to appoint the chairmen. After some fairly energetic electioneering Margaret Hodge, former consultant, one-time Islington council leader and once a minister in the Labour government found herself chairman of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC).

This is the body of MPs that examines the management of public money and holds officials, some of them Whitehall mandarins, to account for their work. It does this through audits carried out by the National Audit Office (NAO), possibly the best research organisation available to anyone in Parliament or government.

Hodge has a reputation for taking no prisoners and being forthright in her views. When leader of Islington Council she was known as “Enver” Hodge, after the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha. While there she also became embroiled in controversy over claims the council failed to respond adequately to allegations of child abuse in the borough’s care homes. One man accused her of being ultimately responsible but Hodge was forced to apologise for a letter she wrote in which he was described as “extremely disturbed”.

She became a consultant with PwC from 1992 to 1994 and then entered Parliament viewed as a solid Blairite. She became children’s minister but moved when the controversy over Islington’s care homes emerged. In 2005 she became a minister at the department of work and pensions. Perhaps her most notable success came in the recent election in which she defended her seat against the BNP. Hodge won emphatically with a majority of more than 16,000.

What happens next?

After becoming PAC chairman it was not long before Hodge was once again dealing with controversy. The Guardian reported that the NAO had spent £80m on refurbishing its offices. It also reported that the Budget was signed off by Parliament but Hodge was quoted saying she was “taken aback” and asked, rhetorically, “who evaluates the evaluators”.

The big question is just how candid Hodge will be. It would not be unexpected if she used the NAO’s reports to become even more strident in passing comment. Either way we can be assured that Hodge’s time at the PAC is unlikely to be without incident.