APPENDIX 116
Memorandum from David Smith, former Secretary
to the MRC Task Force on NIMR
I worked for the MRC until my retirement on
30 November, and my last role was as Secretary to the MRC Task
Force on NIMR. I attended your Committee's session on 1 December
as a member of the public, and I would now like to submit my own
evidence.
I address three specific issues and then add
some general comments.
(i) the NIMR Heads of Divisions, in their
evidence to the Committee, express concern that no minutes of
the Task Force meetings were kept. I agreed with Professor Blakemore
after the first Task Force meeting that we should concentrate
our efforts on issuing very quickly after each meeting an agreed
summary of the meeting and its conclusions. This was intended
to serve as a record of the meeting and a means for disseminating
an agreed statement of conclusions to stakeholders and the public.
No doubt a verbatim record would have been helpful in resolving
current differences of recollection about Task Force meetings.
But anything short of a verbatim record (for example, traditional
minutes) would have taken considerable time and effort to agree
and publish, and would have been unlikely to add value to the
process.
(ii) Dr Lovell-Badge reported to you that
I had refused to put a non-confidential e-mail of his on the MRC
website. No doubt the MRC could let you have, in confidence, a
copy of the letter I wrote to Dr Lovell-Badge and Professor Blakemore
about this. But, in brief, my concern was that the e-mail from
Dr Lovell-Badge in question, and a previous one from him to Professor
Blakemore, were potentially actionable. It seemed to me that,
as an MRC official, it would have been irresponsible of me to
publish such documents on the MRC's behalf in case publication
led to legal action (whatever the views of the author). I also
declined to publish a reply from Professor Blakemore to the first
of these and an acknowledgement of the second, since these could
not be readily understood without reference to Dr Lovell-Badge's
e-mails. In all this, I took advice from the MRC's Human Resources
Director and from the MRC's legal adviser on personnel matters.
(iii) I would like also to respond to Dr
Gamblin's statement to you that "On the Task Force website
there are e-mails which are marked `confidential' and e-mails
which are not marked `confidential' and the MRC secretariat decided
which ones would go on the web."
The only editorial action taken by the Task
Force secretariat, except as described above, was as follows:
— to exclude from publication ephemeral
messages (eg about travel arrangements), and throughout to edit
out references to the names of the consultants since otherwise
we would have infringed our confidentiality agreement with them;
— to hold back genuinely confidential
e-mails, including some responses to confidential e-mails that
were not marked confidential but which could be only understood
in the context of the confidential messages.
I say "genuinely confidential" because
you will see that a number of published e-mails do bear a "confidential"
header. This was because they were replies to earlier genuinely
confidential messages, but did not themselves need to be kept
confidential. I sought to include all of these on the MRC website,
consulting the author if I was in doubt.
To the best of my recollection, the MRC website
contains an otherwise complete set of e-mail exchanges between
the Task Force members.
Please note that Professor Blakemore had no
involvement in the publication of the e-mails.
Finally, I would like to add my impression of
the conduct of the whole Task Force process by Professor Blakemore,
with particular reference to the allegations of coercion. I am
not in a position to comment specifically on Dr Lovell-Badge's
dramatic allegation against Professor Blakemore, and I am sure
you will be seeking Professor Tomlinson's input on the allegation
that he was "coerced". I can confirm, however, that
throughout the Task Force process there was frequent robust debate
among the members, in meetings, during telephone conference calls
and through e-mails. All this was to be expected given the difficult
and controversial nature of the subject matter. What surprised
me was that the group achieved consensus (this is not in doubt)
on almost all aspects of its output, notwithstanding the novel
(perhaps unique?) presence of two members of staff on such a strategic
review. For me, this is a tribute to Professor Blakemore's leadership
of the exercise, and the disagreements that emerged in the last
few weeks of the group's work should be not be allowed to over-shadow
the achievements.
December 2004
|
