Meg Hillier: Meet the Public Accounts Committee chairwoman taking over from Margaret Hodge

Less bark, the same bite? Wait and see

HSBC executives being grilled by Margaret Hodge during a Public Accounts Committee hearing in March this year (Rex)

Meg Hillier has a tough act to follow. This parliament’s Public Accounts Committee chairwoman had a ringside seat watching her predecessor, Margaret Hodge, tear into tax avoiders and the tax man.

“It is very exciting – you see all the guts of Whitehall spilled out in front of you,” she says of the committee she has sat on for four years. Hodge become a folk hero for recession-hit Britain, battling against the arcane tax arrangements of HSBC and Starbucks. In the end, some say there was too much grandstanding and finger jabbing, but if the PAC under Hodge went too far, Hillier’s critics fear that on her watch it won’t go far enough.

To those who view her as a softer touch and likely to be less effective than her doughty predecessor, Hillier, 46, says: “People are entitled to their own opinion but the proof of the pudding will be in what we achieve in five years. Margaret wouldn’t have predicted she would have done all the stuff that happened to come across the path of the PAC.”

Certainly, there has been no loss of pace since Hillier took the reins in June. In November alone, the PAC has found that Network Rail “lost its grip” on managing major projects such as the electrification of the Great Western mainline, labelled the lack of scrutiny of the £40m of taxpayer funds given over 13 years to the failing Kids Company charity as “staggering”, slammed HM Revenue and Customs for poor customer service it said was affecting tax revenues, and said the Government would have earned more from Eurostar if it had delayed the sale of the state’s 40 per cent stake.

HSBC executives being grilled by Margaret Hodge during a Public Accounts Committee hearing in March this year (Rex)

Nor has the grand Commons office with Pugin-inspired walls that comes with the job changed much. Since March, when Hodge granted me a valedictory interview, the sofa has been moved and Hillier admits the portrait of William Gladstone, who was involved in setting the PAC’s structure and function, is also under threat of being taken down. But any effort to shift the committee’s goalposts has been more subtle.

It is a given that Hillier’s themes for her term include accountability. That means following taxpayers’ money wherever it goes, including to private contractors and charities. “I would love to see Freedom of Information extended to organisations that are spending taxpayers’ money on public services.”

There is also transparency, which means getting the National Audit Office to be less siloed in its reporting and look more widely at value for money across government. Part of that involves considering “cost shunting”, where cuts in one area, such as social care, can lead to budget blowouts elsewhere, such as policing. And then there is the impact of English devolution, where deals with Greater Manchester and the West Midlands mean more money will be spent at arm’s length from the central government machine. “Is Whitehall really geared up for this? Departments chuck money down the line and do they really watch what is happening to it afterwards?”

Tax will still play its part. In particular, Hillier wants more disclosure of myriad tax reliefs – such as by how much they boost the nation’s income rather than, critics say, merely pave the way for tax avoidance. Meanwhile, George Osborne has promised to clamp down on those companies that divert profits out of Britain. “There is still unfinished business there I think. The Government talks the talk but we are going to make sure they are delivering on what they say.”

And central to the PAC’s work is keeping an eye on HMRC, which is recruiting to do a better job of closing the £34bn “tax gap” of uncollected revenues. Hillier demanded the agency do better this month when it was revealed that HMRC answered only 50 per cent of phone calls during the first half of 2015. The PAC would also like to see more “highly visible action against those people getting away with not paying their tax. It is pretty important as a deterrent”.

Is she expecting too much by calling for a change in the mindset of civil servants, by calling for them to admit their mistakes when they are summoned to give evidence? If they do, “they will get an easier ride from us, frankly, if they tell us something is wrong and how they are sorting it. Dragging it out of them is painful all round”. The tech start-ups in her east London constituency think nothing of ripping up an idea and starting again. Taking a leaf from them, “failing fast needs to be a bit more of Whitehall mantra”.

Hillier, who talks so fast that even my recording device is exhausted, claims years of experience in making sure the numbers add up. As an Islington councillor she took decisions on where to spend a £300m budget. When Hillier made it to the London Assembly there was more scrutiny, discovering that Ken Livingstone, who was mayor at the time, had not tendered several major contracts properly.

Hillier moved across the river from City Hall to Westminster in 2005, elected as MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch. She made early progress at the Home Office as a junior minister, promoting the unpopular National ID cards scheme. It was slower going in opposition when Hillier was shuffled out of the shadow energy brief by Ed Miliband in 2011. It is no surprise that she “didn’t find his leadership easy to work under and I was very often unclear about the messages and what our policy was on things”.

In contrast, she is closer to Jeremy Corbyn, becoming a councillor on his patch of north London in 1994. Hillier has campaigned for him and he endorsed her for the London Assembly. Even though she says “we have always worked very well together”, Hillier adds that “he and I and everyone would recognise it is a challenge in five years” to propel Corbyn into Downing Street. She adds: “The challenge for Jeremy is moving from open and genuine discussion. That is great but at some point you have got to settle on positions.” Hillier has settled on hers. Less bark, the same bite? Wait and see.

CV: Meg Hillier

Education: Portsmouth High School followed by St Hilda’s College at Oxford University where she read philosophy, politics and economics.

Career: Journalist for the South Yorkshire Times and then a housing magazine. Elected councillor in the London Borough of Islington in 1994. Mayor of Islington in 1998. London Assembly member from 2000. Hackney South and Shoreditch MP since 2005. Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee since June.

Personal: Married to Joe, who runs the Leadership Centre for Local Government, which trains NHS managers. They live in her constituency and have three children: two girls aged 13 and six and a 16-year old boy. Cycles to relax.