Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, I would like to share with your Lordships' House, for the first time, my experience of trying to deal with the complicated matter of BSE as it makes clear this distinction. I committed myself to total openness; I knew nothing that the public did not know. It was the only way in which one could be sure of obtaining people's trust. Nothing was hidden. We did not have risk registers in the sense that we do today but it would be quite wrong to say that we had not considered every possible risk. I put it to your Lordships that there is a difference between what you know and the extreme cases which you ask about in order to make sure that what you know covers everything that you could know. If in the middle of that terrible crisis newspapers more interested in their numbers of sales had accused the Minister of uncertainty because he had asked about risk—and I do not need to go into the kinds of risk you had to ask about—it would have been impossible to make what were already difficult enough decisions. It turns out now, 20 years later, that the decisions were right but at the time they could only be what you knew, and what I knew I shared. Consider also what it meant for my civil servants. Do your Lordships really believe that your civil servants would be able to be as frank and direct and complete if they found themselves and their relationships being used as part of a battle? There were some terrible battles at that time between people who had all sorts of other interests. Compare this to another case, which out of kindness I will not be too detailed about. For many years in the ministry of agriculture a particular view had been upheld and we had been told that it was true. When I sought further information I discovered it was not. It was at that point that I tried to establish a very clear distinction between what you know and what you have to ask about which you do not know. The risk register has come into our governmental structure largely from private business. I sit on the boards of a number of companies and chair several; in all those cases we have a risk register. That risk register is only useful if it is kept entirely to the company itself, because you want to ask questions of a very extreme kind. I ask the noble Lord, Lord Owen, whether he can imagine a Foreign Secretary who had to reveal his risk register asking what would happen if this or that Government did this or that, or what would happen if some Middle Eastern state refused to allow our ships into the Strait of Hormuz at this moment. Would any Foreign Secretary be able to be Foreign Secretary?