Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
MR BOB
MOORE, PROFESSOR
SHEILA CRISPIN,
MS ANDREA
JEFFERY AND
MS JANE
HERN
18 FEBRUARY 2008
Q20 Chairman: She is sitting there,
and she says, "I am persuaded"—right?
Ms Hern: Yes.
Q21 Chairman: What did she then do?
This does not bode well for the future if the first act of somebody
who is persuaded is to leave their post!
Ms Hern: I do not think it was
their first act, but—.
Q22 Chairman: The reason for asking—if,
in all seriousness, the previous Chief Vet was persuaded, usually
this results in some kind of internal action in the Department
that galvanises the wheels to start churning. I am just concerned
that you have made out a case, as professionals who are well connected,
who have one of Defra's senior officials as part of your Council—but
you would have thought if they needed to understand the issues
they would have got the message by now, from what you have said.
I am still not quite clear what is your reason, apart from the
fact that you have been told. I know what you have been told,
but what do they tell you quietly? When you are sitting next to
the Chief Vet at the Council, what did she say to you as to why
there was no action? Come on, you can tell us; you are amongst
friends.
Mr Moore: My name does not come
next to her, so I would not sit next to her at Council.
Q23 Chairman: It is alphabetical—I
see!
Mr Moore: We are simply told that.
There is the pressure of time and there are other things that
are more important; and they did not feel this justified them
setting aside time to deal with it now.
Q24 Mr Williams: You have speculated
on what the composition and numbers of the Council might be, and
said that you would like a separate system to deal with complaints
about professional conduct. Have you any ideas of the composition
and how you would recruit people to the committees that were going
to look at complaints of professional misconduct? Would the profession
still have the majority in those committees?
Mr Moore: Under the new structure
that we have designed, we have not got into the fine detail of
how many individuals. In broad terms we would see something around
50% of the people who were on Council being lay people. We would
not expect it to go higher than that.
Q25 Mr Williams: But none of those
would be on the committees.
Mr Moore: That is the Council.
The committees would be appointed by a commission that would suggest
people, a mixture, we hope, of veterinary surgeons, veterinary
nurses and lay people to act in those capacities in preliminary
investigation and as a disciplinary committee. It would be an
independent commission to do that. None of those people would
be members of the Royal College Council, so that the rule-making
in Council would be entirely independent, and the Royal College
Council would not appoint or have any influence over the appointment
of any of the people who were then to investigate or judge on
the rules that were set.
Q26 Chairman: Can I be entirely clear?
You are absolutely clear in every detail what it is you want,
because you just gave me the impression a moment ago that you
had not quite thought through yet?
Ms Hern: Not down to all the bottom
line, precisely how many people, but we have got the structure
clear in our heads in the sense of the standard-setting—the
board that would investigate complaints and take any prosecutions,
and then the Conduct and Competence Committee, as we have called
it, to deal with the adjudication.
Q27 Chairman: The reason I asked
that question was that I was almost getting a flavour of a draft
bill; in other words that you might be not quite clear on every
"t" that has to be crossed and "i" that has
to be dotted, and that a good first step would be a draft bill.
Do you think that would be a good idea?
Mr Moore: In defence of what I
said, what I meant was we did not decide whether it was 24, 26
or 30 people that should be on each of these groups, but we have
an idea of how they should be constructed. We—Jane—could
probably draft out, on a couple of sides of A4, the skeleton of
what we wanted to see in place.
Q28 Chairman: "Could probably"—that
is a little tentative for telling a department—
Mr Moore: I did not want to commit
Jane to something—
Ms Hern: I could not draft anything
in terms of a bill.
Q29 Chairman: I just wanted to be
clear about how well thought-out the Royal College's proposals
were. If you are going to say to Government, "We need the
following changes", nobody would expect you to draft in parliamentary
speak what you thought it was, but one would expect you to have
a very clearly thought-out specification.
Mr Moore: Yes, we have got that.
Ms Hern: In terms of giving the
policy instruction, yes.
Q30 Paddy Tipping: I just wonder
why you have not done that and put this together because you have
been on the case since 2003, have you not? You did some initial
work in 2003 and Defra did some work in 2003. I think there is
some notion now that there will be a White Paper. You are a well-resourced,
professional body; why does the body not go your way and come
forward with—not in parliamentary language that we do not
understand, some of us, but a series of points?
Ms Hern: We have.
Mr Moore: We have done that.
Ms Hern: We have submitted fairly
detailed proposals to that extent to the Department. I think you
have even had copies of the documentation.
Q31 Paddy Tipping: Why do you not
draft it up as a bill, a take-it or leave-it bill?
Ms Hern: Because that takes some
technical expertise, with respect, which we do not have.
Q32 Chairman: No, but you can buy
it in.
Ms Hern: Yes, at a cost, and it
requires some technical expertise to even draft instructions for
parliamentary counsel.
Q33 Mr Gray: I am sorry to interrupt,
but it is not a very big cost at all; you are talking of a few
thousand pounds.
Ms Hern: I think we would be talking
quite a lot more than that for the complexity of the legislation
that we are talking about.
Q34 Paddy Tipping: But it is a series
of putting forward successive ideas and model clauses, and the
form of words at this stage. What I really wanted to press you
on is that earlier on you talked about changes in the health professions,
and what you are recommending sounds very much like what the health
professionals have done, which is to—
Ms Hern: To an extent, yes.
Q35 Paddy Tipping: Can you not pinch
their ideas?
Ms Hern: We have tried, and I
have even talked to officials in the Department of Health to see
whether we could get on the back of the legislation they have
got coming forward so that we could at least get broader order-making
powers, but joined-up government does not exist to that extent.
The other point in terms of why we have not drafted instructions
to parliamentary counsel or the equivalent—we have been
working with Defra officials and there is an extent to which we
have to recognise that that is their job and not ours, and if
we start doing it, then you lose something of the working relationship
that I hope we have established.
Q36 Miss McIntosh: With all the bills
and acts, the detail is often in the regulations and statutory
instruments giving them—if you like, the legs or tools to
do the work. I would like to know why you think primary legislation
is necessary and why we could not go down the path of suggesting
regulations under clause 25 of the 1966 Act.
Ms Hern: There are not sufficient
order-making powers in the 1966 Act to do all of the things that—
Q37 Miss McIntosh: Could you specify
then precisely what order-making powers you would seek in the
primary legislation? If you are saying they are not sufficient,
why do you need primary legislation?
Ms Hern: To get the broader order-making
powers or to put a new framework in place with subsidiary order-making
powers attached to it.
Q38 Miss McIntosh: Then you must
have more idea of the detail than you indicated to Mr Tipping!
Ms Hern: I think—
Q39 Chairman: I think that what Anne
McIntosh has alighted upon is a possibility within the existing
legislative framework for order-making powers. In our briefing
session you made clear to us that whatever happened that would
still require a change to the primary legislation if you were
to introduce new order-making powers. Did I understand that correctly?
Ms Hern: We need new primary legislation
to get broader order-making powers.
Chairman: That is clear.
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