I want to concentrate mostly, if I can, Dirprwy Lywydd, on Carillion, a behemoth, a super-charged company that aggressively chased complex Government and public sector contracts, always looking for the next deal to cover the costs of the last. It was propped up by a Government that continued to award it multi-million-pound contracts well after the writing was on the wall, causing the supply chain damage that others have pointed to this afternoon. And, when the house of cards finally fell, the Carillion collapse has left in its wake a depressingly familiar tale of untouchable directors, a devastated workforce, lost pensions and business failures by others who had depended upon Carillion for their livelihood. Dirprwy Lywydd, I am going to rattle, in less than 30 seconds each, through 10 lessons that I think are there to be drawn from this experience, as the motion suggests. First of all, while there are real personal failures vividly set out by Lee Waters, the real lessons of the reports are of institutional failure: failure by the company, failure by the many different regulatory regimes designed to prevent those failures from happening in the first instance. It's in looking at those institutional failures that we draw the real lessons.

And the second lesson from that is that, in terms of corporate governance, we need to reform directors' duties to make promoting the long-term success of the company a primary duty of those directors, not pursuing the short-term interests of only one group of relevance to that company—shareholders. The pursuit of shareholder value has surely been one of the most inhibiting factors in the way that British companies have been run over the last decade and more. It's for that reason that the TUC, and my party, argue that worker directors should be placed on the board of companies with more than 250 workers in order to demonstrate that there is more than one interest at stake in the way that those companies are operated.

In the fourth lesson, we say that investors' corporate governance rights should be subject to a minimum period of share ownership of at least two years, otherwise we are exposed to the sort of activity that we saw when GKN was taken over by a hostile bid from Melrose, a short-term asset stripper, where the people who voted to take GKN into that ownership were short-term shareholders piling in at the last minute, buying shares and voting for the takeover in the hope of speculative gains and lining their pockets from the profits of the deal. There has been a curious silence from the Conservative benches during this debate, Dirprwy Lywydd, but let me quote one of their number at Westminster, Robert Halfon, when he described it as 'robber baron capitalism at its worst'. And we can do better than that.

My fifth lesson is in the audit, accounting and reporting regimes, which Jenny Rathbone particularly highlighted. Audit companies should not be permitted to engage in contracts for other business services with their clients. It puts them in an entirely false position. Every one of the big four auditing companies worked for Carillion in some capacity at some point, and, as the Financial Times says, a system where we have too few companies to fail is simply not one that benefits the public.

The sixth and seventh lessons are to do with transparency and accountability. We believe that all providers of public services should be obliged to provide details of supply chains, company ownership and governance structures in order that the public can have an insight into what goes on.

We believe, seventhly, as Lee Waters said, that procurement approaches need to be informed by value, not simply price. In an eighth lesson, we need to rethink company law to address the limited liability that is provided to directors of limited companies. The Guardian has argued that just signalling such a step would 'send a shiver through boardrooms'—and a healthy and purposeful shiver too.

'Limited liability is supposed to encourage entrepreneurship. In Carillion's case it seems to have created moral hazard'.

It invited directors to act recklessly because they were able to avoid any personal consequences of their actions.

On to the final two lessons, and, very briefly, Dirprwy Lywydd, first of all, we need to deal with that fundamental difficulty that is caused when Governments outsource work only because it moves debt off the Government balance sheet. It is a cosmetic effort solely, and it really should be eliminated by changing Government contract accounting.

Finally, and most of all, Dirprwy Lywydd, the lesson that I think we draw from these experiences is the one that Lee Waters started with, that public services should be designed, funded, run and evaluated by the public sector, with democratic participation so that it is the public interest and not the pursuit of private profit that is at the heart of the way that our public services are run.