Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80
- 99)
TUESDAY 6 DECEMBER 2005
MR DAN
CORRY
Q80 Chairman: Good morning, Mr Corry.
As you know, the Committee is making progress with an inquiry
that has been referred to it by the House and we are grateful
to you for coming along to answer the questions which I and my
colleagues want to put to you. Can we go back to the session at
which evidence was being given which generated the inquiry. When
Chris Grayling asked the question and Stephen Byers gave the answer,
you were in the room at the time; did it strike you that the answer
was not quite right?
Mr Corry: I have to confess, to
be honest, before reading and preparing for this, I would not
have been able to tell you that I was in that meeting—I
know I was now—so I do not remember it. I sometimes went
to Select Committee hearings and I still do with Secretaries of
State. I do not actually remember being there. I also do not remember,
although I now know that I did, looking at the transcript. So
the answer is I do not recall how I felt, I am afraid.
Q81 Chairman: I think we have established
that you were there.
Mr Corry: Absolutely, I can see
that from the record.
Q82 Chairman: But you have no recollection
at that meeting of thinking that that answer was not quite right?
Mr Corry: I do not.
Q83 Chairman: Okay. Can we go on
to the transcript. The transcript of the exchange was sent to
the Department for checking and what is now generally conceded
to have been the wrong answer was not picked up by the Department.
Does that surprise you?
Mr Corry: There is an issue as
to what people thought, what people heard, what people were looking
for. I have seen from things like those which were helpfully sent
by the Clerk, that the thing that I commented on, which I guess
was in all our minds at the time, was exactly what happened at
the meeting with John Robinson on the 25th.[1]
I suspect that is what people were obsessed about. I am not sure,
to be honest, how surprising it is. In terms of transcripts I
do not always know what departments do with the transcripts. Sometimes
the Secretary of State reads through the transcripts in a lot
of detail, from my experience; sometimes they hardly look at them
at all, apart from some passages. Officials read through them
for the accuracy. I do not know whether when officials read through
they are just looking to see whether there has been some sort
of mistype or something like that or whether they are looking
to see whether the Secretary of State said something which now
turns out to be wrong. I think probably they do do a fair amount
of the latter, particularly on factual issues, so if the Secretary
of State says there are 25 per cent of schools in such and such
position and actually the position was 30 per cent, they will
correct that. So I am not sure what the process with transcripts
from select committees is.
Q84 Chairman: If a Department found
that an answer had been given which was incorrect they would take
the opportunity of correcting it when they got the transcript,
and for whatever reason that has not happened in this instance?
Mr Corry: Yes, you are assuming
they thought there was something that was said that was wrong
and maybe they did not.
Q85 Chairman: I think it is generally
conceded, even by Mr Byers, that the answer was incorrect.
Mr Corry: I am just saying if
the officials had heard something and they thought that was absolutely
wrong, they would have done something with the transcript but
presumably they did not. I do not know.
Q86 Chairman: What, in your view,
was the right answer to Mr Grayling's question?
Mr Corry: That takes us back to
what was going on from when Stephen Byers became Secretary of
State to the 25th July. Of course, it is all dancing on pinheads
as to what words mean but certainly from the position I was in
we were doing some scoping work. A group had been commissioned
to do some scoping work on possible options for Railtrack. I guess
if I had been asked that sort of question I might well have said
something like I had commissioned some scoping work on potential
options for Railtrack.
Q87 Chairman: There would not have
been any difficulty in giving that sort of answer to the Select
Committee?
Mr Corry: I cannot see why. To
be honest, if a new Secretary of State had come into the Department
and was told early on that one of the big issues was Railtrack
and had not commissioned some scoping work, that is where he should
have some serious questions to answer.
Q88 Chairman: You were at the stocktaking
meeting with the Prime Minister in July. Does that stick in your
memory?
Mr Corry: I am afraid there were
a number of stocktaking meetings with the Prime Minister over
this period and they all, in my mind, merge a bit.
Q89 Chairman: Can I just stop you
there. Was there more than one stocktaking meeting with the Prime
Minister during this period?
Mr Corry: Not before 25 July.
I am not sure they were always referred to as stocktaking meetings
but I think there were a number of meetings sometimes, referred
to in the trial, as trilaterals, so there were a number over the
whole period up to the demise of Railtrack but I think there was
only the one before 25 July. What I am saying is I do not have
a picture of being there at that particular one as opposed to
the other ones.
Q90 Chairman: Referring to the meeting
that took place in early July, would it be fair to say that at
that meeting there were discussions about options for Railtrack?
Mr Corry: Again it is dancing
on what you mean. There was not any kind of serious discussion
or discussion about should we do this, should we do that, should
we do the other. There was a discussion about Railtrack (and I
am saying this, to be honest, from reading the minutes because
I do not remember the meeting) but certainly we were not in a
position for Ministers to have had discussions on options really.
The question was getting the scoping work going to work out what
the potential range of options was. I presume at some point Ministers
would have come back and had a discussion about that.
Q91 Chairman: One final question
from me. Was it your view that your Secretary of State was, by
and large, adequately briefed for his encounters with the House
of Commons?
Mr Corry: I think so. In my experience
Secretaries of State and the way they prepare for select committees
is dependent on their personality and so forth. They are always
given a vast amount of briefing and they tend to read through
it, focusing on some bits they think they are not so clued up
on. Stephen Byers tended to do a lot of that himself, as most
Secretaries of State I have worked for have done. Sometimes—and
I cannot remember in this case—they have officials in or
a chat with advisers or whatever just to say "Here are three
difficult questions; what should I say if they ask that?"
I presume that had he felt there were some things he had not got
briefing on he would have asked for more briefing. In life in
government, as you know, there is always an incredible amount
of time pressure and the idea that you have hours and hours to
go through all your enormous briefing and check everything is
absolutely right and so forth, or that when you give evidence
that you more or less read out from your briefing, that is just
not how it works.
Chairman: Thank you very much. Do colleagues
have any questions? Mr Llwyd?
Q92 Mr Llwyd: You prefaced your remarks
by saying that you were not sure about this particular Transport
Select Committee meeting that we are referring to. How many Transport
Select Committee meetings had you been to before that time?
Mr Corry: It may have been the
first. I am afraid, I just do not—
Q93 Mr Llwyd: Still you have little
recollection of it?
Mr Corry: As you can imagine,
this whole period was quite an intense period and also obviously
with the trial and so forth I have read through it all, but being
honest I do not have a picture of that particular meeting that
I can tell you I am imagining and remembering that particular
meeting rather than another one.
Q94 Mr Llwyd: You mentioned that
sometimes officials look through transcripts to check for mistyping.
Surely that is not their job, is it?
Mr Corry: It is one of the things
you do with Hansard, again not something I do, but sometimes Hansard
get some of the words wrong and so forth and you correct them
and sometimes Ministers say things unclearly, sometimes they are
transcribed wrongly.
Q95 Mr Llwyd: What I am getting at,
in effect, is highly paid professional people such as yourself
would be looking at the content, whether it is accurate, whether
it accords with government policy and so on.
Mr Corry: It is not part of the
contract of the Special Adviser that you shall read through every
transcript and absolutely check. I suspect, to be honest, I very
often do not look at transcripts. I know I did look at this transcript
because I gave a comment on it, particularly around 25 July, but
in terms of other officials what they do, I am afraid I do not
know whether it is the private office that tends to read through
the transcript to check what is there, or whether it is policy
officials.
Mr Llwyd: Thank you.
Q96 Mr Jenkins: Mr Corry, one of
the things I cannot quite get my head round because I have been
there and seen it and got all the bells and whistles, et cetera,
if I had gone to a meeting with the Minister and the Minister
had, whatever, inadvertently misinformed, misled, if I did not
quite get it in the meeting—ding ding—if I was asleep,
if I was running around putting out fires in the Department and
I had a lot of work to do, that is fair enough. If you asked me
now go back three months and find out what I was doing three months
ago I would, like yourself, have difficulty remembering exactly
what went on in a particular meeting. The one thing I would do
is if somebody the very next day brings something up in the House
of Commons regarding that meeting I would make sure I re-visited
that meeting, I would get the transcript, I would go through the
transcript, and I would say to everyone who was there, "Let's
get our side in order, let's make sure we record exactly what
we recollect went on because this might grow at some time in the
future; it might fade away but it might grow." That to me
is a professional approach to the job so why did you or the Department
not do that?
Mr Corry: I am probably not as
sighted as I should be in all this because I do not totally recall
what then did happen. You are saying the day after the Select
Committee and the evidence that Stephen Byers gave something else
happened. I am afraid I do not recall what it was that happened,
so I am unsighted.
Q97 Mr Jenkins: Put it this way then:
if you knew when you went to a committee meeting and evidence
was given and taken and the next day in the Chamber someone raised
a point of order with regard to the accuracy of some of the contributions
from the Minister in that meeting would alarm bells ring within
the Department and would somebody be responsible for ensuring
that the transcript was checked to make sure it was accurate?
Mr Corry: Should that happen in
theory, I do not know, it sounds like a sensible thing. Whether
it did or not I am afraid I do not know. I do not know on the
day, it is not clear to me, you would have to ask the officials.
Certainly to me—and you would have to ask the officials
who were there as well—did the answer that Stephen Byers
gave, even though he now says it was wrong, make people jump up
and say that is the wrong answer or did they feel, as I might,
it depends exactly what you are referring to? As I say, the answer
that probably would have been the best answer to have given is
to say there was some scoping work going on in the Department
and that would have been, if you like, the best answer to give.
Whether the answer he gave was so at variance from this that people
fell out of their chairs and said, "Oh dear, what have you
done?"; presumably they did not. I do not know, I do not
recall there were issues then raised the next day in the House
and what happened then I am afraid I just do not recall. I know
it sounds ridiculous but it is a long time ago and there was an
awful lot of stuff happening at the time.
Q98 Mr Jenkins: That is why we rely
upon the written record. So what exactly did you do for the Minister?
Mr Corry: I was his Special Adviser.
Q99 Mr Jenkins: What does that encompass
insofar as you were not—
Mr Corry: As a policy specialist
I worked on all the policy issues that were around. There were
a lot of issues there in terms of Railtrack coming out administration,
a lot of stuff on London Underground, a lot of stuff on planning,
on housing, all sorts.
1 Flag 4 [not printed] to Memorandum from the Department
of Transport [Appendix 7]. Back
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