SIR CHRISTOPHER KELLY KCB

10 JANUARY 2008

  Q60  Mr Liddell-Grainger: Is that a good thing to be in what is a dynamic job?

  Sir Christopher Kelly: It is never good to be boring, is it? People do not listen to what you say.

  Q61  Mr Liddell-Grainger: If you are, by your own admission, boring, are you in the right job?

  Sir Christopher Kelly: I would not have accepted the job if I thought I was not capable.

  Chairman: One of the requirements of the job, by the way, is to listen to questions like that and nothing can be done about it!

  Q62  Mr Liddell-Grainger: I have looked down the list of the people you have on your Committee. I know Gillian Shephard and Alun Michael. Do you think you have the right dynamism for the job—which is getting more complicated because more and more publicly-funded bodies are coming on-stream by virtue of the way government is operating? Do you think you have the quality of people to do the job you are set up to do?

  Sir Christopher Kelly: I have no reason to think I do not have the quality of people. Not having met them—and their reputations are there—I think you do them a disservice if, by implication, you associate them with my boringness. It does seem to me that the power of the Committee stems from two factors. One is the fact that we do not pronounce into the ether; we do base most of our announcements on evidence. The other is the fact that we are a group of people with considerable experience and expertise from different parts of life. If that makes us boring, then, I am sorry, but that seems to me to be a strength of the Committee rather than otherwise. If it reassures you at all, we are in the process of recruiting new members to the Committee, and one of the first tasks I have had to do is to sit on the short-listing and I have been very pleased indeed with the very high quality of the applicants for the vacancies.

  Q63  Mr Liddell-Grainger: Who makes the decision on the appointments of other members? Is that you and the Committee or an external body?

  Sir Christopher Kelly: The decisions will be made by a group which consists of me, Sir Alex Allan and the same independent assessor who sat on my panel.

  Q64  Mr Liddell-Grainger: Do you know how many publicly-funded discharging bodies there are that you are meant to be looking at?

  Sir Christopher Kelly: No, I do not.

  Q65  Mr Liddell-Grainger: I have asked you the question because I do not know either. If we take Members of Parliament, Members of the European Parliament, NHS bodies, non-ministerial office-holders, other bodies, elected members and senior officers of local authorities, how many people are you meant to be looking at?

  Sir Christopher Kelly: We are not, are we? As your own report of a few months' ago shows, there is now a whole host of bodies looking at standards of behaviour, and it is not our job to get into the detail of all of those, of everything that the Standards Board does, everything that all the independent standards committees do, everything the local authorities do or everything the Electoral Commission does. Our job is to stand apart from all of that and to look at the picture as a whole and at areas where there needs to be improvement or additions.

  Q66  Mr Liddell-Grainger: To understand the problem, you have to understand the depth of where all this goes, and it covers the whole of the United Kingdom. Do you think you have that depth to be able make the recommendations, considering that we do not even know how many bodies you are meant to be looking at?

  Sir Christopher Kelly: Are you talking about me personally or the Committee as a whole?

  Q67  Mr Liddell-Grainger: The Committee as a whole.

  Sir Christopher Kelly: Do I think we have the depth? Yes, is the answer. We could be set up in another way: we suffer both the strengths and weaknesses of being a committee of only 10 people.

  Q68  Mr Liddell-Grainger: Given what you have seen so far, and you have your crystal ball sitting on the table in front of you, what would you like to see change? You have come in with ideas, you have come in with—dare I say it, having said you are boring—dynamism and you are looking to do new things. What do you want to do?

  Sir Christopher Kelly: I think the distressing thing is that you can spend all the time you like in designing regulatory bodies and codes and so forth—and I am not in any way denigrating them: I trained to some extent as a social scientist so I think structures and incentives are important to the way that people behave—but the real issue is the political culture in which people operate, and there are some things which happen, that continue to happen, which suggest that some people still have not got it.

  Q69  Mr Liddell-Grainger: We are not quite there yet: what would you like to see? Let us look at specifics. Do you want to see your brief broadened? I think the Committee has put out 11 reports. Would you like to see more power given to you? Would you like to see more resources given to you to be able to look further? Give us some ideas of what we are going to be looking for in the five-year plan.

  Sir Christopher Kelly: It is much too early to ask me for a five-year plan.

  Q70  Mr Liddell-Grainger: You must have ideas.

  Sir Christopher Kelly: Of course I have ideas but it is much too early to ask for a five-year plan in my first full week of the job, before I have talked to all of the members of the Committee. On the question of resources, I frankly have no idea whether we have enough resources to do the job properly. I am told we do. I dare say I will discover whether that is true or not. I am sorry if that is a boring answer.

  Mr Liddell-Grainger: Touche.

  Q71  Mr Hopkins: Perhaps I could say from the start that I think boring is an admirable quality. If one looks at the appalling damage inflicted on the world in the last 100 years, most of it has been done by charismatic politicians. So stick with it!

  Sir Christopher Kelly: I shall wear a pink tie next time I come!

  Q72  Mr Hopkins: Absolutely. Your predecessor's term of office coincided with a particular Prime Minister. How much of the tensions that occurred were to do with the particular Prime Minister and the particular Chairman? Now we have a very different Prime Minister and now a very different Chairman, do you think it will be a little bit calmer, partly because of the change of regime?

  Sir Christopher Kelly: Certainly, from the conversation I have had with the existing Prime Minister, he has made clear his commitment to take the work of the Committee seriously. Indeed, I think there is some comfort to be gained from the fact that one of the first things he thought it important to do as Prime Minister was to issue that Green Paper: Governance of Britain. As I have already tried to demonstrate, I intend to make sure the Committee maintains its habit of robust independence. We will judge him on the basis of his actions rather than on what he says he wants to do.

  Q73  Mr Hopkins: From your friends in the Civil Service, is there a sense in which, the Blair-Mandelson regime having passed, there is a great sense of relief, and we are into, again, a more sensible period of government?

  Sir Christopher Kelly: I have been out of the Civil Service for seven years.

  Q74  Mr Hopkins: I am trying to ask whether your life is going to be a lot easier as Chairman.

  Sir Christopher Kelly: I do not know.

  Q75  Mr Hopkins: The previous Chairman's sharpness and abrasiveness was partly to do with the regime with which he was dealing.

  Sir Christopher Kelly: That may very well be true. Am I looking for an easier life? Answer: No—because that would be boring and I am interested in having an interesting life.

  Q76  Mr Hopkins: I think we are in for more boring times myself, but there we are. We have talked about the closeness of your Committee and yourself to government. Even though, obviously, you are a man of personal integrity—and I am sure we would all approve of your appointment—the perception outside might be that government has appointed someone closer to itself than in the past. Are you going to make efforts to make sure that perception is diminished and that you are very much your own man?

  Sir Christopher Kelly: I am conscious that people will say what you have said and, indeed, one of your colleagues has said the temptation will be to do something silly to demonstrate that I was truly independent. I hope to resist that temptation. Equally, when the opportunity arises, as no doubt it will, to demonstrate independence then I will do so.

  Q77  Mr Hopkins: Where there may be a suspicion of lower standards in public life than there should be, will you be proactive in hunting out the difficulties that still remain, the inappropriate behaviour that still remains? My own view is that things have got a lot better and, hopefully, that will continue, but are you going to enthusiastically pursue any wrongdoing?

  Sir Christopher Kelly: Of course. Any consistent patterns of wrongdoing, yes. Yes, of course.

  Q78  Paul Rowen: What do you think is the most single most important issue to deal with in standards in public life at the moment?

  Sir Christopher Kelly: I can only give the answer I gave before, which is that I think it is issues of political culture. Now we have a very substantial amount of infrastructure in place and a whole lot of regulators who did not exist 14 years ago and a whole lot of codes of behaviour. I think the issue is about making sure the political culture matches the standards that most people within it want to uphold.

  Q79  Paul Rowen: How do you see your Committee—

  Sir Christopher Kelly: There is a whole host of individual issues which clearly need to be dealt with, of which the funding of political parties, for example, is clearly one, and, dare I say it, MPs' pay and allowances is another.