CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 83-vi

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION COMMITTEE

LEAKS AND WHISTLEBLOWING IN WHITEHALL

Thursday 2 April 2009

SIR SUMA CHAKRABARTI KCB

Evidence heard in Public Questions 357-409

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Public Administration Committee

on Thursday 2 April 2009

Members present

Dr Tony Wright, in the Chair

Paul Flynn

David Heyes

Kelvin Hopkins

Julie Morgan

Mr Gordon Prentice

Mr Charles Walker

________________

Witness: Sir Suma Chakrabarti KCB, Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Justice, gave evidence.

Q357 Chairman: It is a great pleasure for the Committee to welcome this morning Sir Suma Chakrabarti, Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Justice. This Committee has benefited from your wisdom at certain points in the past in your previous incarnations and it is a particular pleasure to see you again now. As you know, the Committee has been doing, amongst other things, an inquiry on the whole area of leaks and whistleblowing and this is the concluding session of that inquiry. We wanted someone to come and speak, as it were, from the Government and for the Government on how it sees these issues and how it sees the system and you are the person. Would you like to say anything by way of introduction?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: Thank you very much, Chairman. It is nice to be back after such a long break. The last time I was here was with Clare Short and we were discussing public service agreements, targets and so on. What I would like to do is help the Committee with outlining the departmental perspective on the issues you have been discussing. I have read through the transcripts of evidence by others and there are some interesting issues that emerge from that. I have worked in five different departments but as Permanent Secretary of two: DFID for nearly six years and now 16 months at MOJ so I will focus particularly on those two departments. They tell an interesting tale of how these issues are handled in different departments, different cultures and so on. If there is one thread that runs through what I am going to say, I think the context in terms of politics and media interest is a major issue; the interplay of that with departmental cultures, because they vary quite a bit; and the third bit of the theme will be around staff confidence in the systems. You will not hear from me a defensive line that we have got it absolutely right; I do not think we have yet. It is improving but what you will hear I hope are some ideas for further reform of the system.

Q358 Chairman: Would you say something more about those first two points? Could you expand on those?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: If I may start with a couple of statistics which tell you how things are handled differently in DFID and MOJ and understandably so. My last year as Permanent Secretary in DFID was 2007/2008 and there were, from memory, 15-odd whistleblowing episodes, all of a fairly minor nature around things like overtime claims and things like that but important. In the 12 years of DFID there have been just a handful of leaks, not necessarily all to do with DFID but DFID was involved. Contrast that with the Department for Constitutional Affairs, as it was before May 2007, no leaks in living memory until April 2007 and, as far as I can work out, no approaches to nominated officers or anything like that. The MOJ was created in 2007 since when we have had only four cases go to nominated officers: three in the National Offender Management Service and one in the main headquarters. There were four in two years but we have had quite an increase in the number of leaks, many more than DFID has had in 12 years. That brings out a couple of things for me: one, the political and media interest being quite an important part of this. In day-to-day politics the media interest is not around international development issues. I was lucky as Permanent Secretary of DFID as I did not have to worry in the way David Normington or someone at the Home Office would have to worry about how issues are playing here and all that. I was able to get on and try and change the culture of the department and do good policy work with my team. That is quite a major issue because as we imported criminal justice programmes and as we evolved the National Offender Management Service, prisons and probation, into the Ministry of Justice it is interesting that that is where the leaks have congregated around, that set of issues, because they are of high political interest and the media is understandably interested in them. The other thing is culture and what is the business of the department about. In DFID there are very few leaks, because the policy debate in DFID is so open, including porous boundaries actually in discussing very openly with politicians, with academics, think tanks, and so on, that staff do not feel the sense of "I am not being listened to. I am not being heard." It is much more difficult in the whole arena of criminal justice, although Jack Straw and I are trying very much to change that culture. Part of what we are trying to do at the MOJ is create a much more open culture so the staff feel much more confident they can be heard and then I think the leaks issue will die away slowly.

Q359 Chairman: As you say, it is the political and media pressure which above all explain the different cultures of those two departments in this respect, is it not?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: That and I think culture takes a long time to change. I do not want to go back in the mists of time but it is quite interesting that DFID, from Barbara Castle's time on, as Overseas Development Minister in the 1960s, has had a very strong professional cadre: economists, engineers, etc. The sense of challenge around what is good policy was very strong from when I joined the organisation in the mid-1980s. You felt it was OK to say, "Actually, I read that evidence differently." It is quite interesting that at the MOJ one of the things Jack and I are trying to do is build up our research and analysis staff. It was very, very small. We did a survey and it was one of the smallest in Whitehall. For a department of 80,000 people it was tiny given the policies we were looking at. That is something we are trying to build up because that will lead to a much more challenging and open culture.

Q360 Chairman: We heard interesting evidence a couple of weeks ago from a Carne Ross who was the diplomat who resigned following Iraq. He had a number of things to say to us one of which bears directly on what you are saying now. He said he wanted the Foreign Office to be an open learning culture, very much as you described DFID, that would have a single face to the world but inside would be very dynamic and lively. He said it was because it was not that he felt there was such a problem. If that is true, and if departments do differ so greatly, and that has repercussions for things like leaks and whistleblowing, what can the centre do - and you are someone who has been at the centre, the Cabinet Office, and did the work on the Cabinet Office - to make sure that the culture of departments actually is of one kind rather than the other?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: One of the roles of the centre is to try and argue for very good policy making. In my view, and many others' view, in most areas of policy there is a small list I would have which would be exceptions, and I think David Omand gave you the list of exceptions. In most areas it is possible to have a grown-up debate. You will improve policy if it is more open and I think the Cabinet Office should be pushing that. When I was in the Cabinet Office you will recall that I helped create the Performance and Innovation Unit which is the precursor to the Strategy Unit. The whole point of that unit was to be more like a an American think tank, more like a Brookings Institute, which would try and discuss policy with a wide set of people outside the Civil Service, brought in from outside, put things on websites, which was radical at the time ten years ago, and have workshops involving lots of people outside. It had two types of report: the "of the Government" report which said this has been tested and the Government buys into this, and it had "to the Government" reports which said essentially "This is still speculative and the Government will want to consult further on it and think about it but we are putting it into the public domain as well." That led to some very interesting and good policy making and staff felt very empowered by that whole process. The Cabinet Office has a role to push that example out to the areas where it can.

Q361 Chairman: Can I ask you if, in your career - and you have been a public servant for many, many years - you have ever been in a situation yourself where you have thought that whistleblowing was an option?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: No. I was reflecting on this because I thought this might come up. There have been occasions, of course, in all civil servants' careers where you deeply disagree with the decision of the government of the day. Let me highlight one, because it is in the public domain and everyone knows about it, the Pergau Dam. I was the Private Secretary to the Minister for Overseas Development at the time, Lynda Chalker, and my Permanent Secretary was Tim Lankester at the time. We looked at the evidence and clearly this was a bad project in development terms. Tim asked for a direction from Douglas Hurd because the Overseas Development Administration, as it was, was under the Foreign Office at the time. It all came out but we followed process. He was right to ask for a direction but he did not go to the papers. The economists, the engineers, who had worked on the project and appraised it, none of us went to the papers. We followed process and I think actually improved things immeasurably. The International Development Act came in because of this project which says you can only give aid now for poverty reduction purposes. The fact that all directions after that point have to be notified from the Comptroller and Auditor General and then on to the Public Accounts Committee Chair came in after that. This was a major public policy benefit, it seems to me, for following the process and not leaking.

Q362 Chairman: Let me try the question slightly differently. Can you envisage circumstances in which a public servant might legitimately whistleblow. The area that has tested this greatly in recent years has been Iraq. We had evidence from some people a week or two ago, including Dr Brian Jones who was the defence intelligence expert, who did very much as you are describing in relation to Pergau Dam. He put the memorandum in to make sure that he and his colleagues were not going to be scapegoated afterwards. What I am going to ask you is would there not have been a proper case for someone who was so worried about the distortions that were being imposed upon the intelligence evidence in the run up to war not to do something pretty dramatic about it?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: It rather depends on one's definition of public interest. I am one of those people who defines public interest in this country as having an impartial Civil Service able to serve any government. If that is the case, then the Civil Service Code matters enormously to me and that is my definition of public interest. Under that definition I do not think it is right to go down that route. If you feel very strongly as a matter of conscience, which it clearly can be, you do what Elizabeth Wilmshurst did. I think that is a very noble thing to have done.

Q363 Julie Morgan: I was interested in your description of the differences between different departments. I noticed you said that you and Jack Straw were in discussion about how you can make the Ministry of Justice more open and transparent. Can you give us some ideas about what you would do to make that happen?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: There are some things, particularly when you are creating a new ministry, which are to do with structures, skills, systems, and they are, if you like, quite important. In this case, one of the things that I thought was very important, and Jack agreed - and he is quite into numbers like me - is actually building up the research and analysis side of the Ministry, as I mentioned earlier, because this was incredibly weak compared to what we needed. If you talk to criminologists out there they say it is not a ministry or a set of people who really engage with them as they would wish and we wanted to change that. We protected that area at a time when we were cutting budgets elsewhere. That is a structure and skills issue. I would say the biggest issue when you try to create this sort of culture is behaviours. Do the ministerial team, Jack and other ministers, and the senior officials, me and my board, exhibit the behaviours that we want in the Ministry in order to encourage greater openness? This goes behind the usual description of open doors and "Come and talk to me any time that you want." That is helpful, of course, and we all do that but it is much more about trying to reach, in our case, 80,000 staff through the Senior Civil Service and the Ministry and others and saying these are the principles by which we will live and actually then making judgments about the people around how they do their jobs. We do not just say, in my case when I appraised my director-generals, "Did you actually carry out your business objectives" but "How did you carry them out? What did you do? Did you run a meeting in a way that other people at the meeting felt they were being heard rather than being told what to do?" Those behavioural aspects are incredibly important and that is what I tried to do with DFID and that is what Jack has encouraged me to do very strongly and supported me in the MOJ.

Q364 Julie Morgan: Were you able to reach thousands of staff involved?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: It takes time. As I said earlier, culture takes a long time to change. It is easier in some parts of the organisation than others. It will take a good five years to get to the culture that he and I want to get to; you cannot do it overnight. Partly it is about changing some of the people because some people have grown up in a culture and are not willing to change; partly it is about role modelling behaviours and advertising good behaviours. Once a month I have staff celebration lunches. These are great because I can talk to a whole range of people from different grades who are mainly out in the field and not in London. They bring extraordinary learning but they also see that senior managers want to hear from them. My career started a very long time ago, 25 years ago. I remember at that time it was impossible to talk to the Permanent Secretary or ministers. They went up and down in separate lifts from the rest of the staff. It is a completely changed world. The idea that you could say to the Permanent Secretary "I think you have it wrong" was out of the question. These were omniscient, omnipotent people. That is the sort of culture we are knocking back and we are trying very hard to do that.

Q365 Julie Morgan: You can tell the Home Secretary he is wrong now?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: I have spent my lifetime often telling ministers they are right and often telling them "I disagree but I will faithfully implement what you have decided."

Q366 Julie Morgan: These lunches you have to draw people in, how do you decide who to invite?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: I do not pick them necessarily. I have groups out there in the businesses to pick the people who have really done things to turn around culture in their smaller units. We get each of them to tell stories to each other about what happened and what also held them back. I do not just want them to talk about how wonderful it was but also what are the things that held back the more open culture which we are trying to create and the change in performance we are trying to create so we get some learning across the businesses.

Q367 Julie Morgan: Obviously that is the culture you want to reach but in the meantime do you think that the internal systems that are there are satisfactory for people who want to use the internal whistleblowing systems?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: They are a lot better than they were a few years ago but they are not good enough is where I am on this.

Q368 Julie Morgan: What would you like to see done?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: There are a number of ideas. I was quite interested in reading the Public Concern at Work survey of 2007, and of course Janet Paraskeva is doing her own audit now and we will have the results and your Committee will have some ideas. Here are some ideas that I know both DFID and MOJ have been kicking around. Can we make the hotlines, which some departments have and some do not have, much more available across all departments so every department has that sort of thing? Can we have confidential email boxes? I think that would give staff a lot of confidence. Those are two ideas. Secondly, nominated officers. I do not think it is enough to have across 80,000 staff six nominated officers, which is what we have in the MOJ. It beggars belief. It could be that the four cases we have had in two years were because we have had insufficient staff on this. It could also be that we have not enough diversity in the nominated officers. I was looking at their grade, their seniority, where they are from, what career experience they have and I did wonder if you are a prison warder way out somewhere in Haverigg in Cumbria would you feel that you could approach these people. Would you know any of these people? I think that is an issue. Non-executive directors are interesting. The National Offender Management Service is very good on this. One of their non-executives is also a nominated officer and two of the four cases have gone to him which tells me that people may feel some confidence not necessarily going out of the department but at least going to someone who is not directly in some sort of line management chain. The other thing is about giving whistleblowers much more attention after they have made their complaint. We do not put ourselves enough in the shoes of the whistleblower. It takes quite a bit of courage, I should think, to come and say "I think the department has got this wrong and you should look at this." I am sure we listen very politely and then deal with the complaint and so on but do we, in dealing with the complaint, go back to the whistleblower and say "Here is how we are dealing with it. Here is where we have got to in the process." I think we probably value the duty of confidentiality to the person we are investigating, or the group we are investigating, at that point more than we value the whistleblower and we have to value them equally in that process. Secondly, I think at the end of the process there should be aftercare of whistleblowers. I do worry that it is sort of "That is it; it is over." Whether your complaint is upheld or not upheld we need to go back and get them involved, thank them for what they did, for raising the issues, but also to get them involved in trying to redesign the system if there are improvements that could be made. Finally, there is an issue around corporate governance, whether enough is being done to ventilate these issues from either the internal audit committee or the human resources committee up to the main board. There is an interesting issue as to whether there is a pattern emerging. I did my own analysis before I came here which is what I revealed at the beginning as the pattern in the MOJ. We should be discussing that at the board and we have not been so there is a corporate governance issue as well. There are also some issues for the Cabinet Office but we can touch on that later.

Q369 Chairman: Assuming that there is that collection of things that could be done, and you have identified those for you in your department, whose job is it to make sure that those kind of proposals would be generalised across government?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: In the end I think it is the Cabinet Office. The Cabinet Office owns the overall procedures and processes on this; they would set the standard framework if you like. The Cabinet Office ought to be, as part of the development of the centre, even if it is not a very interventionist centre, looking at best practice across departments and saying "This works. This does not seem to work so well. You should try this. Department X should try that." I have talked to the Cabinet Office before I came to this hearing and they are up for doing something like that after Janet Paraskeva and you have reported.

Q370 David Heyes: That issue of consistency would apply also to how you investigate leaks and there is again a lead role for the Cabinet Office. How effective and appropriate do you think the current procedures and processes are for investigating leaks and could we do it better?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: There are one or two areas where we could do it better. Let us just go through the process as it is at the moment. It is worth describing because I have had to go through it a few times since I joined the MOJ. What happens at the moment is the departmental security officer every day goes through, for example, the press cuttings, and he would receive reports from other people as to things that might look like a leak. One of the issues he has to decide with my office and myself on certain occasions is: is this really a leak? That is the first decision. Sometimes people jump to conclusions that this is a leak when it is a misinterpretation of a press notice we put out probably more than anything else and it is not really a leak at all. Sometimes it is not malicious but a complete accident: someone has gone off piste in briefing, a briefing which has been agreed with ministers, and so on. That is the first decision to make: is this really a leak? Then there is an issue about establishing an audit trail. How did this get to there? Who was involved? Terms of reference would have to be agreed with me, the set of interviews would have to be done and then there is a report to me. At that stage there is an issue, if it is looking quite serious, as to whether we need to bring in someone from the Cabinet Office list. The Cabinet Office has a list of investigators who can basically do a more technical analysis particularly on the IT systems. That is the stage when we have to make that decision: is this worth going down that route? That is where some of the issues now arise for improvement. This is not something about the Cabinet Office but actually about technical capability in the Civil Service. What I have found, from anecdotal memory, is it was easier to conduct these leak investigations in the era before email existed. Then there has been an era when it has become much more difficult because email gets sprayed around and it is very difficult to locate where it came from. Now the technical tools are beginning to exist where you can actually with email trace where the leak has come from. That is the thing that is not yet widespread enough in usage in departments. It is called a track and trace system. There is a technical issue, and having a list of Cabinet Office investigators who are really on top of that technical skill is something we really need to have.

Q371 David Heyes: Is there an implied criticism of the Cabinet Office investigators in what you say?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: No. In the one instance where I have used them in the last year, they were incredibly helpful and they narrowed down the field because they were able to use some of the technical skills. In fact, they pointed out that if we recalibrated our IT system in a certain way they would have been even more successful. They could narrow it down to a few people and they could have gone down to the actual person. They were giving us good advice so it was useful I would say.

Q372 David Heyes: How often have you used them yourself?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: Only once in the last year.

Q373 David Heyes: Did you form a judgment about their effectiveness? You say they need to move with the times with the new technology to deal with electronic communication but in other ways did you sense that they were up to the job and were the appropriate people to use?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: On the basis of one contact, yes, I did. I thought this person was incredibly helpful and did not just carry out the investigation and stop there but actually said there are some systems issues that you might want to think about which would help in the future.

Q374 David Heyes: Who do they report to?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: They are on the Cabinet Office list. In terms of the actual investigation, they are reporting to me because their report comes to me through my departmental security officer and then there is a notification to the Cabinet Office of what they have done as well.

Q375 David Heyes: Is there learning taking place as a result of those investigations? You could perceive the act of the investigations to be a safety valve rather than something that people learn from a changed procedure. What are your views on that?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: There is insufficient learning going on I suppose is the burden of my remarks. What we have got is a system which has many pros, this whole delegated system. For the last 20 years we have been pushing decisions of power away from the centre into departments, whether it is pay, policy and so on. It is much more departmentally run now including this whole leaks and whistleblowing process. What I would like the Cabinet Office to think about, post your report and Janet Paraskeva's work, is whether standardisation is required in this area. It does not look right to me to have the survey from Public Concern at Work which shows departments spread, and some departments which are quite similar, in very different places. I am sure in the two years since then there has been some narrowing of the gaps, however that looks odd to me. If I was the centre that is what I would encourage them to do: to have some standardisation but then to have a bit which is tailored for different businesses.

Q376 Mr Walker: What you said is if you are going to leak use your home computer. You have now basically put on the record that you can check any computer used by any of your civil servants for distributing leaks, so the parks of London will now be full of people handing over brown envelopes.

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: If I really thought that the Civil Service was full of leakers going to parks and doing that then I would not stay in the Civil Service. I do not think that is what the Civil Service is like.

Q377 Mr Walker: Now that it is known that civil servants can have their emails tracked by this new super-duper software surely they will just find other ways of leaking?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: Those who wish to leak, and this has been said in evidence to you by others as well, in the end you cannot stop them leaking if they want to leak because they will do other things. The key issue, it seems to me, for people like me, managers of the service, is whether we create a system and a culture which makes people feel they are heard properly and they do not have to resort to this. They can resign if they do not agree with the decision.

Q378 Mr Walker: You said earlier in your evidence that you needed to change some of the personnel within your team. Do those people know who they are who are not performing culturally?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: Yes. Whether it has been in DFID or the Cabinet Office before that, I am completely open with these people on a personal basis as to what sort of performance we need and where they are and where I am in terms of these issues.

Q379 Mr Walker: When you say that they cannot adopt the culture, what are the barriers to them adopting the new culture that is being driven forward? What is stopping them embracing the new way of work?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: I'd best talk about myself. I grew up in a culture which allows you to be good at certain things and then you are put into a different context where you are required to adapt and it is quite tough. In my case, having turned 50, it is quite difficult to suddenly find a different way of doing things. You can do incremental stuff I am sure but we do find it tough, as all of us do I think. The question then is at what pace can you go? There will be people who you need because there are elements of their experience which are vital for delivery of the department's agenda but you also want them to shift in the way they handle their work.

Q380 Mr Walker: It was announced on Monday that there is going to be an end to early redundancy of senior civil servants so many of the tools and mechanisms at your disposal for moving people on or out have now been removed. How are you going to change the culture given it is now so much more difficult, as of Monday, for you to move people on?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: We will see what comes of that. There are discussions going on in how to implement that approach on redundancy and early retirement. If that was the only tool in our locker, then I would forget it but there we were in DFID trying to move the culture on in some aspects too and it was incentives within the organisation that helped do it. People who go to that organisation are incredibly committed to the agenda of that organisation and what helps to move them on is not whether person X or person Y should be moved out of the organisation but whether we are rewarding through promotions, through a clear sign of promotion if you like, the behaviours on the way. Who is getting on and who is going up the organisation has a telling effect and we judge them by behaviours.

Q381 Mr Walker: What you did say earlier on was that you wanted to get people out of your department. Do you get them out of your department into retirement or do you get them out of your department into someone else's department?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: First of all, I want to get certain people out wherever I have been who will block the reform needed to make the organisation effective. That is not a massive number of people but there are certain people of course in any organisation. I think I have a duty as a civil service person not to shift the problem somewhere else. When permanent secretaries ring me up because some of my staff have applied for jobs, I give them an honest appraisal. I do not say, "This is the best person I have ever seen" simply because it might suit me. You have to think about the corporate good of the Civil Service. You also have to face up to the fact you have a management job here and you should not displace it to someone else.

Q382 Mr Walker: Knowing that you do that, do you feel your staff may not be honest with you? You may have staff who want to challenge you and fundamentally disagree with your management style and some of the decisions you are taking yet they might be stopped from challenging you as robustly as they might knowing that if they decide they cannot work with you, or you decide you cannot work with them, they are going to find it very difficult to find work elsewhere in the Senior Civil Service because you are on the phone to the Permanent Secretary of the other department giving an honest appraisal? Do you understand what I am saying? There are some quite interesting dilemmas here.

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: There are some dilemmas there but I do not think they are that big. The number of staff we are talking about is quite small and so far, in my experience, it does not seem to have stopped them from telling me where I am going wrong. I encourage that because I want to get away from this sense that the Permanent Secretary always knows best. It is important for us as permanent secretaries, compared to our predecessors, to say more openly "I do not know the answer to that" or "We may have got this wrong" or "I may have got this wrong and I need to shift." I do not have a problem with that as long as I do not keep saying it too often or I should not be in the job.

Q383 Paul Flynn: Did you have a Pergau Dam moment when Jack Straw decided to veto the publication of the Iraq war minutes?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: I do not want to talk about that because what civil servants thought is not in the public domain on that one. Essentially what we did was deal with the process. It is true that it was a Cabinet decision and Jack published it. We did not have much more role than that.

Q384 Paul Flynn: Do you think this is an example of leading from the top in creating this atmosphere of transparency and trust when the Secretary of State decides to censor documents that should be in the public domain?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: This goes back to the David Omand list of issues which would require ultimate ministerial authority before officials disclosed information. If you recall, David was saying, and I agree with him very much on this, that there is a vast space of information released every day. I come here with my brief, which is not cleared by Jack, and talk openly; I am self-authorising. I am using my discretion but there are a set of issues which must remain in a more private space if we are to have a proper discussion.

Q385 Paul Flynn: If we take this particular issue, it is one that Katharine Gun and Carne Ross decided to wreck their career over. They felt so strongly and impassioned about this that they gave up their job, their pension and so on. It is a decision that Parliament is still wrestling over. We might well, as parliamentarians, have sent 179 British soldiers to die in vain in a war that was based on a lie. Is there anything more important than that in which a civil servant has the duty to leak and try to put information into the public domain that could have altered that decision?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: There will always be, through any civil servant's career - and the Iraq war was undoubtedly one of the biggest issues, and I was Permanent Secretary at the DFID at the time - where civil servants will feel extremely strongly about a subject and think about their options. Obviously Carne Ross thought in the way he did. I know his case a bit better because he was in the FCO at the time. My own view is for me, as a civil servant, what overrides that is my continuous objective of public interest which is around observing the Civil Service Code and being able to say, hand on heart, whether I like the decision or not, I can serve any government.

Q386 Paul Flynn: Katharine Gun said if she had gone to a line manager or someone else she would have been told "There, there, do not worry your pretty little head about this. It will all come out in the wash" and nothing would have been done. Carne Ross said that all he could do was nibble around the edges of the decision and ultimately he went from that. Clearly it was a principled decision that he made. Is it not sad that there is not a place in our Civil Service for people of these high principles?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: There are many people of very high principles in the Civil Service. Just because you do not go public does not mean you do not have high principles. The interesting issue, from what they have said to you in their evidence, is whether the systems, in the two organisations they were in, were frankly good enough for staff to have confidence in them. Clearly what they were saying is they did not have that confidence.

Q387 Paul Flynn: Carne Ross said if he had made a fuss about this internally he would have been marked - not his words - with a black spot and he then would be consigned to a future not in a beautiful embassy in Paris or Washington but would probably end in up Belarus or Baku or somewhere.

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: I thought you were going to say Ouagadougou or somewhere like that, somewhere I know at least. I cannot comment on that. It is not the Foreign Office I know and it is not the Foreign Office that Peter Ricketts, my colleague, is trying to lead. The Chairman said earlier that Carne Ross was saying the Foreign Office do not have an open and learning culture but actually both Michael Jay and Peter Ricketts have been trying very hard to change the culture in the Foreign Office, clearly from Carne Ross's point of view not enough. I do not know what would have happened to him or his career. How can I know?

Q388 Paul Flynn: If we can look at those who leak not for ethical reasons but for commercial reasons or political reasons or for private gain, Claire Newell was an example. I think she was a journalist and she was accused of taking up the job and then leaking several embarrassing things about the Government in The Sunday Times about Cabinet splits, and so on, the introduction of identify cards. This seemed to me purely a career move by this woman for financial gain. She was employed, I understand, as temporary staff. Evidence has been given to us that perhaps we should look more carefully at temporary staff to avoid people coming in in this way. How can this be done?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: I am talking from the MOJ experience because we do have a number of temporary staff. Looking at the pattern of leaks we have had, they have not been associated with temporary staff; there is no correlation there. What is important, it seems to me, with regard to temporary staff is making sure the basic personnel security standard processes are really followed so we know much more about the identity, the employment history, the suspended criminal record, what these people are doing. I gather she was in a sensitive post in the Cabinet Office in a minister's office. I do not think those posts should be open to temporary staff. You have to go through the whole security clearance, the counter-terrorism clearance, to get into those posts. That is where I would be.

Q389 Paul Flynn: One presumes the great mass of the Civil Service very rarely see anything that is worth any value as far as the papers are concerned. We had another case where the allegation is that someone was strongly politically motivated and had been a candidate for a political party, which was not the government party, and was using his position, in a very sensitive position, in order to leak repeatedly. Should there not be some kind of system? We do not want to ban people with strong political motivations from being in the Civil Service but should we be more on guard against that?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: I wonder which case you are describing. I obviously cannot discuss the case because there is an investigative processes going on but on the general principle I agree with you very strongly that we should not be barring people who have a political past from joining the Civil Service. The question, it seems to me, rests much more around sensitive posts like the private office - how recent was their political past? If you were running in an election only a few months ago and then you went into private office, I think that would give me cause for concern. As I understand it, in the case you are describing the person may well have had one or two other jobs before he went into private office so, in a sense, an understandable view might be that he has already distanced himself from his political past and, therefore, could be put into the private office post. Even with my principle, I think he might well have passed. You have to make a judgment. I have come across fast streamers in my career. When I was in the Cabinet Office I remember one fast streamer who very honestly said, "I worked for the Liberal Democrats as an activist just before I joined the fast stream." I was able to have a discussion with ministers as to whether they were comfortable with her being so quickly working with them. It was a Labour administration and they were comfortable with that. She was very honest and upfront about it and we should expect that of the civil servant as well.

Q390 Paul Flynn: You talked about the courage of people who leak and the isolation they feel. We have heard that there is very little support for them afterwards and they suddenly become very isolated. Do you think that is a satisfactory position, for those who take their complaint up through the administrative channels, to suddenly may find themselves ostracised?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: I do not think this is satisfactory and this is one of the things I would like to see changed, whether we call it aftercare or what. If your complaint is upheld, of course you feel vindicated, and rightly so, and I think you should be thanked from very senior levels, and possibly from the Permanent Secretary, for actually raising the issue. You should also then be involved in asking why it happened and trying to help the Permanent Secretary and the rest of the board as to how we can improve the system. Even if your compliant is not upheld, you should be thanked for having the courage to raise the issue and have the full explanation of why it was not upheld and making sure there was no victimisation as well. It is quite important for the system to check if this person has been hard done by afterwards so the feelings of Carne Ross and others of bad postings, or whatever it is, are not the reality.

Q391 Chairman: When you replied to one of Paul's earlier questions you talked about the public interest in being a good civil servant and keeping confidences and so on. Is not the trouble that there is more than one public interest? It is undeniable that there was a public interest in Parliament and the public knowing more about the intelligence in the run up to the Iraq war than was the case. There is a rival public interest which in some cases may be greater than the public interest that you describe.

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: It is absolutely right that there are different public interests here at work, particularly in this Iraq case. The judgment I would make - and other civil servants like Carne have made a different judgment - is that the overriding one for me is good government generally rests on me and my team being able to serve any party in government and that is more important. We should use other systems to try and ventilate the issues around Iraq or whatever the other issue might be where the public interest case is also strong. It is not denying that there is not a public interest in the Iraq case, there clearly is. People felt very strongly about it and did what they did. I do not deny that. One has to make that personal judgment - which is the overriding public interest for a public servant?

Q392 Chairman: Your minister eventually resigned.

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: Yes. I am well aware of it and I was heavily involved in it with her. She took a different view.

Q393 Kelvin Hopkins: You have used the word "culture" a lot. I think this is very important - a sense of principle, commitment, esprit de corps of working in the public interest and all of that - but if you talk about culture changing, my impression is that the culture has changed considerably. We have perhaps been through a bad period and we are now getting things back on track in a more modern form. Is that your feeling? What you describe in your own department sounds very admirable.

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: It has gone through ups and downs. What I can do is trace a 25 year trend. In my 25 years in the Civil Service I think, by and large, things have improved for those who wish to speak up, challenge, and so on, compared with when I joined. Also the sorts of people we are encouraging into the Civil Service is probably a better match for what the Civil Service needs to do. For example, I would say ten or fifteen years ago we were still promoting on the basis of just intellectual merit and not really worrying about managerial competence enough. Because of freedom of information, which I welcome, and because of open information generally, there are lots of things out there which tell us we are not doing a good enough managerial job. If those same laws had existed 20 or 30 years ago, there would have been the same issues. If anything, management of those delivery issues is far better now than 25 or 30 years ago. I can see that in the aid programme which I knew very intimately, but also now in the prison and probation service. Look at the number of escapes down by a massive margin and re-offending rates down. You can see this and this is to do with managerial competence being much more valued than when I joined.

Q394 Kelvin Hopkins: There are also differences horizontally, between departments. The problems that arise - not in your department which seems to be admirably run under your watch, but if one looks at the Foreign Office there have been complaints, and even more about the Home Office. Defence is a sensitive area but in the Treasury clearly something has gone horribly wrong because they did not appear to spot what was happening. Did nobody leak that they were being told to keep quiet about our economic problems? We have the worst economic crisis in 100 years and yet no-one saw it coming.

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: I do not think I should be commenting on other people's departments as I do not know enough about how they are run but I can commentate as an observer on Whitehall more broadly. Going back to your first question and looking at this with it, one of the things that we rubbed out was market intelligence in certain departments. If you look at when I was in the Cabinet Office worrying about the car industry in the West Midlands, it was striking then that I was having to get information from as was the Department of Trade and Industry at the time, from merchant bankers, because they were still doing analysis around the car industry, and from academics. We had rubbed out some of that intelligence about how does this market work, how does the industry work, because we had been pushing work out of the Civil Service if anything. There is an issue around that which Whitehall does need to think about more procedurally.

Q395 Kelvin Hopkins: Carne Ross, when he came before the Committee, described a culture of giving the minister what he wanted to hear and said "Internally, I thought that the most open and indeed ferocious debate should be encouraged, so we would get the best possible policy as a result. In my time in the Foreign Office that was not the case." We have often talked about speaking truth unto power and I personally have emphasised the importance of debate, particularly on things like economics. Has that kind of debate been combed out over the last two or three governments?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: I can only go on my experience. The sorts of jobs I have been in and the people I have worked with we have done a lot of speaking to power, truth unto power, in the way that one Warren Fisher keeps getting quoted in all the evidence. We have done a lot of that, whether it is the Pergau Dam nearly 20 years ago through to policies of today. We discuss, debate and suggest different options. We say to ministers, "I do not think this is going to work. It looks good on paper but delivery-wise I am not sure we can bring it off." Those sorts of debates are going on all the time. We are having a very good debate around some of those issues right now in our ministry with ministers. I have not seen that supposition. It keeps cropping up in every era. It was said in the 1980s as well that the Civil Service does not speak truth unto power, to that government, but it is not my experience.

Q396 Kelvin Hopkins: I have nearly a quarter of a century of experience working in two bureaucracies myself, one of which was modelled on the Civil Service. They were similar in their bureaucracy, with a democratic leadership, one of which was the TUC. Within those organisations there was trust in the sense that one could raise, at any level, as an officer - I was a research officer - and say, "I have concerns about this" and be treated with respect, perhaps to be told "Unfortunately that is the policy" and one would accept it. None of us would ever have dreamt of leaking because we had a loyalty and a sense of the importance of the integrity of the organisation. We had that sense of trust which is so important. Was that broken in the Civil Service?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: No, I do not think it is broken. I think it is very strong in my department, this bond to each other. It is a very good point you make and I should have brought it out. In all the evidence you have heard so far that I have been reading, what has been brought out much more is the worry about the corrosion of trust between ministers and officials. That is, of course, true and I agree with what other witnesses have said to you on that but what has not been brought out so much is the potential of corrosion of the trust between civil servants. Just as in the TUC - and Bill Callaghan talked to me a lot about that and his experience there - it is the same in the Civil Service. If you think in a particular area of policy there are people who are leaking all the time, it makes it quite difficult to work with those people. You do not know where you are. You do not know if you are going to have an open conversation and find it in The Times the next day and that breaks that bond. We need to work at that very strongly. By and large there is very strong trust. Can I give you a concrete example of this because I think it might bring it to light? Last autumn a presentation I gave to the MOJ ministers on how we would make our efficiency savings work was leaked to The Times. It was on the front page of The Times. That leak came after six months of a very open process of discussion within the organisation about how on earth we were meant to live with the budget we had been given and discussion involving the unions as well. It was very open because we wanted to be honest and have a debate about this. When it was leaked, of course it was written up in a way as to suggest this was all news - and actually it was not news at all to staff - and there were lots of misinterpretation of options we had been thinking of. It did give the civil servants and the ministry and the ministers pause to say "We are on this path to creating this culture, is this the right thing to do because this is what happens when you do this?" Thank God Jack and his team and the civil servants' leadership decided to stick with the plan, with the project, but it did go to the heart of that, which was your point about trust. Openness requires trust as well and responsibility.

Q397 Kelvin Hopkins: Within one of these bureaucracies, not the TUC, I saw latterly politically motivated small groups determined to change the direction of the organisation, to change the culture of the organisation, to break what was inside it and to thrust in a new political culture, a new direction, ignoring both the democratic processes of the organisation and also the long-established ways of working within the democratic structures. The thing was smashed quite easily, by political force, if you like. I saw a parallel between recent governments of both colours and that situation. Would you think that is fair?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: I have not seen that in that way. I think the analogy works in a department. I would say if you look at the pattern of leaks in the MOJ they are coming from a group of people, not a large number, who are against the process of change. They are either against the creation of a new ministry, because a lot of leaks were around the organisation structure for example, or against possibly the bringing together of probation and prison services into the new National Offender Management Service. It is actually anti-changing the way things are done. There is always a small group in all departments, the vested interest group if you like, who want things to stay where they are.

Q398 Kelvin Hopkins: When one has a problem with a government perhaps being complicit in torture, and extraordinary rendition, and a civil servant is aware of that and thinks this is so appalling that something must be said, at that point your rather comfortable view of discussing things does break down if a government is absolutely wilful and determined to drive ahead and not have these things exposed. Does that not have to be challenged?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: If a civil servant knew that sort of thing was happening, then they should be raising it not just with the nominated officers, and what have you, within their department but I think that is such a big issue they should raise it with the Cabinet Secretary directly and with the Civil Service Commissioners. They have a right now to go direct to the Civil Service Commissioners. That is a big red flag, that sort of issue, where they should be doing that. I am sure the Cabinet Secretary would be very open to that direct access on those suspicions.

Q399 Mr Prentice: When people see the Government subverting proper procedures or decisions that have been taken which are not ethical, then very often they feel obliged to speak out. That is certainly what happened with Katharine Gun - you have read her evidence - the women who worked in Cheltenham. She told us that when she was appointed she was given the spiel about the Official Secrets Act, and so on, but there was a kind of flip side: what you do if you witness behaviour which is unethical. What is happening in the Civil Service now to tell civil servants, when they see something which is clearly unethical happening, they should speak out?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: What we are saying is you must raise it. Again, I go back to the survey done by Public Concern at Work which showed that certain departments - DCMS and DFID came top of that poll - are saying outwardly to their staff, "If you think something is unethical, if you think there is wrongdoing, it is your duty to speak out to express that."

Q400 Mr Prentice: Did they give examples of unethical behaviour or is it just left to the individual? If you feel in your bones that what you are seeing is wrong, then speak out, or are there concrete examples? Katharine Gun had the emails and everything.

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: I have not seen the DCMS guidance. I would say that is certainly something that could be improved in the guidance and one of the improvements one would want to bring in. For example, "If you see this happening, this is what you should do about it." It is true in the four cases the MOJ - I am not allowed to discuss them - at least two of them involved what I would call unethical behaviour and certainly should not have been going on. It was good that the whistleblowers went straight down the process and they have been dealt with straight away. It would be good to give examples, not the actual naming of people but to give more examples of how we do this.

Q401 Mr Prentice: Like proper procedures being subverted. There is this fiction of cabinet government in Britain, as if all members of the Cabinet sit around the table and chew the fat collectively, but it just does not happen like that. There are any number of cases where procedures are short-circuited or there is fancy footwork in some way, is there not?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: If processes are being short-circuited, then as the person who is obviously concerned and accountable for processes in my department I would want to know because I do not think you make good policy if you do that. There are lower level types of things, behaviours which are unethical, relationships and so on, issues like that, which should not be going on and those also need to be picked up. At the heart of the question, and my answer is, there is a problem in the Civil Service in that we tend to be very shy, because we cannot discuss individual cases, of advertising what the trend of cases is. We can anonymise the cases but it would be good to give some examples of what exactly constitutes bad behaviour, with some examples that people can relate to, not in terms of jargon, and also what happened in some of those cases and how we handled them. It is odd that I can only talk about Pergau Dam because it is 18 years ago. It would be nice to be able to talk about some cases in the last ten years which, even if they are not public, we can talk about in a generalised way to show that an action was taken and what these cases were about. Again, this would raise confidence of staff in the system if we could do that and that is an issue in the Civil Service. An analogy is poor performance. People believe we do not tackle poor performance. It is certainly true ten years ago we were really bad at it. We are not there yet but we are a lot better than we were because of the better managers we now have in place. Because we cannot talk about individual cases when we have got rid of people, people have this impression we are doing nothing about it where actually in every department there is much more progress on that. It would be great if we could talk about the trend of this in some way. It would give staff and you much more confidence that we do tackle these issues.

Q402 Mr Prentice: I am not going to ask you the details about Christopher Galley but when is the process going to be completed on the Christopher Galley case?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: I honestly do not know. It is not in my body of work.

Q403 Chairman: On your previous answer, it would be extremely helpful if we had collated across departments all the kinds of cases that were coming up through the system in this way, as you say not naming the cases but describing the categories of cases they were and what the outcomes were. That would tell us both what was going on and also give people far more confidence if they saw that there was a system in place, that these were the kind of issues being dealt with. It is remarkable that we do not have any collation of that kind?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: In preparing for this hearing, what was striking to me is I had to go with my team and do some research on my old department and my current department and, yes, we had the data but it is not as if it is collected across government in any systematic way. One recommendation I would have thought would be quite interesting out of this review, and also Janet Paraskeva's review, might be: could we collect the data and could we tell these stories in a way that people can connect to and understand so they could have confidence in the system?

Q404 Chairman: All we get is the report from the Civil Service Commissioners which tells us the small number of cases which go to them and something very briefly about them. At that level we get it but routinely the system beneath that we do not see.

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: I agree with you on this one.

Q405 Chairman: Can I abuse my position by saying I would like you to answer one more question which is not about this at all? We have been doing for quite some time, and are just concluding, a report which we have rather grandly called Good Government. The intention is to try and look at what we do well and what we do badly, in a general sense, in government and to report on that. We are about at the end of that process but I am struck by the fact that in a way you had to do that exercise for the Cabinet Office not so long ago. You began that by talking about what you thought were the key characteristics of UK government. I am not going to read them all now but it means that you thought your way through some of the things we have been thinking about. You say, as one of the key characteristics of modern politics, a desire to be seen to be in charge drives centralising tendencies and how to reconcile this with the vast and varied business of government. I know that we can have an interesting seminar now on all this but can you try and sum it up for us and tell us, in a nutshell, having thought about it, what we do well and what we do badly and what we might do better?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: On the latter part of that question, I rest my case on the World Bank's analysis of governments. They rate civil services and government institutions and the UK comes first. Of all the overseas governments it is still seen internationally as the best. That is not to say that we should not be learning lessons from other places. One of the problems in the British Civil Service is we do not look enough at some lessons from elsewhere. It is not that we have to transplant everything but there are lessons from other places. In this area, for example, the OECD has done a study on whistleblowing in practice and other places and we should be looking at that. We should be asking ourselves what we can learn from that. As to the first part of the question, when I reflect on culture, how we work and the impact politics has, the problem with some of our politics is it encourages a culture of certainty. You cannot be wrong and if you admit that you might have changed your mind, as Keynes said on new information "I change my mind, what do you do," that is a no-no because the media will go after you. That creates certain incentives and you have to be very big and strong to withstand those incentives it seems to me. You can have a very open policy process with lots of challenge, and so on. You have a decision on what the policy is and you implement it faithfully as a civil servant. You should not then be questioning it because it is the implementation phase. What happens then, when you go to the third phase where you evaluate policy, you say "Did this work in the way we expected?" The answer should be it cannot have worked perfectly, this is public policy. You are not selling widgets. You are trying to deal with human beings who have different ways of behaviour so you will not get a scientific, certain, outcome. It is right, through that evaluation process, to open up the aperture of discussion around policy and try and refine and improve that policy. The problem is, at that point, politicians fear the media will go for them. "You have changed your mind so you got it wrong, did you not?" It creates a really bad downward spiral in public policy making. It makes it very difficult for good ministers and civil servants to try and do the right thing which is where we have a joint interest. We are both interested in getting public policy as right as we can. I think that is a problem.

Q406 Chairman: That is fascinating and also gloomy because what you are saying is it would be extremely good to have an open learning way of doing government in this country but actually that is undoable in the circumstances in which we live.

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: It is doable in certain areas clearly. In International Development it has been done and that is good. It is interesting that because it is not the stuff of day-to-day politics it is easier there to do than in some other areas. I would like to have more of that. In the MOJ we are trying to move towards that. There will always be David Omand's list of issues where it is very difficult in any circumstance to have an open discussion but it is actually a very small list and most of this we should be able to do.

Q407 Chairman: We have not asked you about political leaking. When the FDA came and spoke to us they said the main problem, as they saw it, was leaking by politicians not by civil servants. Finally, is that a big problem and can anything ever be done about it?

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: In the ministries where I have been Permanent Secretary, no, it has not been an issue at all. It is an interesting definition because ministers after all are the ultimate authorisers of what you can officially disclose and what you cannot. A question seems to me is more when ministers put information to the public domain themselves are they going through a process of discussion and decision making as to what should be presented and who should put it in the public domain. In the ministries I have worked in as Permanent Secretary that has happened. Jack Straw, Clare Short and Hilary Benn have been sticklers, first of all, for making sure Parliament knew first before anything was in the public domain and going through that process of discussing who should put it in the public domain and when, so I have not had that experience.

Q408 Chairman: You have special advisers who are doing media work all the time. Presumably they are a big conduit for stuff getting into the press.

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: I have worked with a range of special advisers in both DFID and MOJ very closely and that has not been the case. The special advisers, in a sense, reflect the ministers they work for. Although very different characters, Clare, Hilary and Jack actually care quite deeply about process, they are united on that, and, therefore, a special adviser would not be of that mode anyway.

Q409 Chairman: You are a refreshing breed of Permanent Secretary.

Sir Suma Chakrabarti: That is very worrying; I have probably said too much.

Chairman: We have had, therefore, a more than usually interesting session. We are extremely grateful to you for coming along and talking to us in the way you have. Thank you very much indeed.