Examination of Witnesses (Questions 320-329)
RT HON
LORD THOMSON
OF MONIFIETH,
RT HON
BARONESS DEAN
OF THORNTON-LE-FYLDE
AND MRS
GAY CATTO
26 FEBRUARY 2004
Q320 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Maybe not,
but I am still not convinced that there is stuff going on that
we should not know about. We have a situation where there was
a very serious leak in a national newspaper on a situation which
quite obviously has caused a lot of concern, and the gentleman
involved came before us to put his point of view. He was obviously
not happy. We do not know what is going on. You do not know what
is going on.
Lord Thomson of Monifieth: None
of us can know everything that is going on everywhere but that
is just life.
Q321 Mr Liddell-Grainger: We are talking
about honours.
Lord Thomson of Monifieth: It
is where you draw the line.
Q322 Mr Liddell-Grainger: If you are
a nurse the chance of getting an honour is one in 20,000. If you
are a civil servant it is one in 123.
Lord Thomson of Monifieth: That
is something that can be examined from the statistics. I am not
sure about your statistics but that can be examined. That is why
I very much welcome the inquiry that your committee is taking
on at the moment. It is precisely that kind of area, the distribution
of various categories of honours and so on in a changing society,
that it would be very helpful to have a series of positive recommendations
on.
Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde:
If you are accepting that there is a degree of confidentiality
I would say to you that if this committee knew everything that
is going on that does not mean to say that the whole of Parliament
knows everything that is going on. There are boundaries beyond
which not everybody knows what is going on, and I think also to
predicate law on one clearly unsettling and unhappy case would
be quite wrong. Also, the premise of where you are coming from
is that there are guaranteed honours for certain people. That
is something that I do not think would be a route that most people
would want to go down.
Q323 Mr Liddell-Grainger: There are guaranteed
honours, are there not? Come on. Let us go through the Cabinet
Secretaries. How many have not received a major honour?
Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde:
But that is known and it is transparent, so what do you do? Do
you start to have a list of people in public life? What happens
with the ordinary man and woman who are not known?
Q324 Mr Liddell-Grainger: On that same
review should it not be public? If we are getting leaks in national
newspapers on what is happening, we do not know what is happening.
There are 30,000 people apparently awaiting honours. Were you
aware of that?
Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde:
No, I do not know that.
Q325 Mr Liddell-Grainger: There apparently
are, we have been told, of which about 7,000 a year get a gong
of various types. I do not include military medals. Why should
that not be more open? If we recommend somebody for a gong as
a Member of Parliament or a Lord Lieutenant, whoever, we do not
actually know what happens. It goes into the black hole in Monck
Street. Why should we not be in a position or you not be in a
position in your present positions as Baroness Dean, Lord Thomson
and Lord Hurd to know more of what is going on when we have to
have leaks in newspapers as to the situation with people like
Colin Blakemore, and—I cannot remember who it was—to
spice up the thing. Who was that? It was a sportsman, was it not?
Henman. Henman was stuck in to spice it up a bit. Well, crikey!
That is not good, is it?
Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde:
No, it is not, and I certainly would not want to condone that,
but I do not think the corollary to that is that you need to know
the 30,000 people that are on the list and how that list was whittled
down and who was selected.
Q326 Mr Liddell-Grainger: We do not even
know how it is done. We know that people are stuck on to spice
it up. We know people are chucked off because they are a bit controversial,
but we do not know how it is done. Do you know how it is done?
Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde:
I know how we do our job.
Q327 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Do you know
how it is done?
Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde:
I do not know how everybody else does their job.
Q328 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Do you know
how it is done at Monck Street?
Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde:
No. I do not work in Monck Street and that is not my responsibility.
Chairman: I will have to haul you in
slightly, because it is going beyond our remit.
Mr Liddell-Grainger: Fair enough, Tony.
Q329 Chairman: All very good stuff, but
asking witnesses questions they have not got a chance of answering
is not going to get us very far. Can I just round it off by coming
back to the central territory? You have said very disarmingly
that you think the time has come for your bit of the operation
perhaps to be amalgamated with somebody else and we will reflect
on that. Your operation was set out all those years ago because
of the worries about the read-across basically from political
donations into the honours system. The question really is how
effective you think it has been because you said at the beginning
that it is all about perception. If you look at honours lists
in the last 30 years, both parties, the read-across, all the evidence
is there. It is striking, pages and pages of these donors who
finish up with senior honours. We do not need to go through the
names. Harold Wilson's Lavender list; this is all notorious, and
yet here we have this mechanism that was supposed to be the regulator
or the public reassurer, but it turns out that life has gone on
just the same, has it not?
Lord Thomson of Monifieth: Inevitably
in the evidence I gave in my opening statement I deliberately
tried to help the committee to be aware of the very narrow bit
of the landscape we deal with, and that is all we can talk about
in any sort of collective capacity. I think I speak for Baroness
Dean and Lord Hurd and myself when I say that as far as we are
concerned we very much welcome the inquiry you are making on these
general questions. I can only say in terms of my chairmanship
of the little bit that I am responsible for that there have not
been any Lavender lists in my time, I am very happy to say. The
fact that they could be possible puts a real question mark over
the system and, if I may round up on a much wider landscape, I
do not think there is a case for transferring all the responsibilities
of modernising the scrutiny of the present system on to a tiny
committee of three senior retired or semi-retired Privy Councillors,
but I do think there is a case for having a much wider machinery
of scrutiny. I think that, as so often happens when you start
modernising, as the present government has sought to do, you end
up with more fragmentation rather than less and you have got the
Appointments Commission doing one particular job that we used
to do, and I cannot speak about how adequately it can do the actual
scrutiny of the honours bit of the Appointments Commission; I
simply do not know. It is doing its little bit. We have had our
original job greatly narrowed down and [been] given this rather
larger job in an area where our experience over the last three
years has been that there is no real problem of corruption, buying
honours or anything like that, it is well run by the Civil Service,
for all the questions that have been raised that it may be run
more privately than is necessary, but it is extremely well run
in my experience, and I can speak with some experience of that.
There is something to be said for a different sort of machinery
and I therefore personally await with great interest the final
recommendations that your committee makes when you have had your
general survey of the roll of an honours system in modern times.
Chairman: I think that is the note to
end on. Thank you very much indeed for your evidence which has
been extremely interesting. We are grateful to you for coming
along and sharing your thoughts with us. It is quite a novelty
to have witnesses come along who say that they think their organisation
ought to be wound up.
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