Page 25 - When Things Go Wrong

Staffing

2.15 Staffing the unit with full-time officers would enable it to accrue institutional
memory and secure a degree of permanence. We consider that a complement
of five full-time staff members is sufficient to counteract the effect of civil
service “churn”.
49

2.16 PASC recommended that the staff in a Central Inquiries Unit include
“secondees from bodies versed in investigatory processes such as the NAO,
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the Ombudsmen community and Select Committee staff”. Previous
investigatory experience may well be a desirable quality for those recruited to
the office.

2.17 As an advance on PASC’s recommendation, the Working Party recommends
that at the close of a public inquiry or special procedure inquest (see paras
2.40-2.85 and Annexe), members of the inquiry/inquest team should be
seconded to the Central Inquiries Unit for between six and twelve months
in order to share recent experience. This would allow Government to learn
iteratively from the successes and failures of recent inquiry processes.
Secondees should be drawn from members of the inquiry/inquest team who are
sufficiently senior to have exercised broad oversight of the process.

2.18 This recommendation would serve to address a collateral issue. One consultee
considered that Government has “not been great at understanding the strength
of [inquiry team members’] experience and finding them ‘normal’ jobs” at the
close of an inquiry”. This dynamic may be exacerbated by perceived conflicts
of loyalty. In evidence to Government by Inquiry, Dr Tim Baxter noted that
where “you move to be secretary to a judicial inquiry, your primary loyalty is
to the chairman of that inquiry [but] there are tensions because one is dealing
from time to time with colleagues back in one’s own department and you have

49 The term used in Whitehall to describe frequent movement within or between Departments. See Tom
Sasse and Emma Norris, Moving On: The costs of high staff turnover in the civil service (Institute for
Government, 2019), p. 8.
50 Public Administration Select Committee, supra note 44, para 161.
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