No one is out of scope for the select committees. Ministers, Chief Constables and Chief Executives get "invited" to attend to "give evidence" and be "witnesses". And there are often the charismatic and forthright committee chairs, that take no prisoners. So there's a couple of examples below.
And with recent cases of witnesses correcting themselves some time after giving evidence, some committees are now seeing fit for some witnesses to take the oath, with hand on the bible, "to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth". That makes it purgery for anything that not the truth there and then. It's a powerful turn of phrase to set the scene for the witness..... "The Clerk will now administer the oath to you"
Not only is there strong directness but the role of evidence and data seems to be getting more profile. Here's a couple of examples of the staggeringly direct and demanding challenge from the committee chairs.
Public accounts Committee on Out of hours GP services in England
Monday 1st September 2014.
The audit commission reported on this topic... Out-of-hours GP services cost an estimated £400 million in 2013-14 and an estimated 90 per cent of GP practices have opted-out, and delegated the service.
Again here's the committee purpose...."This inquiry will challenge the Department and NHS England on their oversight and assurance of out-of-hours GP services, on the performance of the system and on the level of public awareness of out-of-hours GP services."
Oversight is such a great term with its different definitional options. It's both "overview" and "overlooked". Can be great to describe "overview" but infer over "looked". That feels like the case here.
So Margaret Hodge is in the chair, questioning the Chief Exec of NHS England, and the Director of Acute Care
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Hodge referring to whistleblower evidence..
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Home Affairs Select Committee on Child sexual exploitation in Rotherham .
Tuesday 9 September 2014
Chaired by Keith Vaz and "taking evidence" from the previous Chief Constable.
There's a clue of what's to come in the pre-committee published purpose from Keith Vaz. "The Committee will be questioning those in positions of authority at the time that these offences were being committed on how the sexual exploitation of children on a horrifying scale was allowed to go unchallenged for so long."
Here's some Vaz statements to the previous Chief Constable.
So Margaret Hodge is in the chair, questioning the Chief Exec of NHS England, and the Director of Acute Care
"You should know it. With the greatest respect"
- "You out to have the basic data rather than just give an example"
- "You see, you don't have data on anything"
"You don't know it's value for money. You don't know because you don't understand your cost base.
"You're creating an absurdity of it"
"I don't know what that means. It's a non answer".
Hodge referring to whistleblower evidence..
"The data that was being provided was falsified....there was no monitoring through the system that enabled that to emerge"
Then some super lines from Richard Bacon...
"The chairs question was about cost not quality"
"That was not my question neither was it Mr Pugh's"
"That was the question to which we were looking for an answer...and it was striking to me that you didn't know that."
"You need to understand your cost base and I don't think you do. You have to understand your underlying cost base and you don't".And some back and forth from John Pugh creating a turn around answer.....
Pugh... "Have you done any drilling down into the figures?"
Willet... "We haven't got a breakdown and we don't know the individual breakdowns and the individual consultations and ratios"
Pugh..."But I'm surprised at that as that's quite a key factor to know on terms of integration of services"
Willet..."Those data better understood locally. There's going to be a variation from locality to locality"
Pugh..."But a variation is a concern".
Willet... "And that's were we have to get to measure the all fragments in the same way. Look across the system to see how it's performing"And then the build up to a strong challenge....
Willet... The "local health economy working with the public will need to decide how best they want to provide and offer the service and what is the best arrangement. Walk in centres remarkably different, across the country where they were what they did, whom they were supported by".
Pugh... "You didn't have information centrality on the extent to which GPs were sub-contracting".
Willet ..."We have a complete inventory of the whole country and we can tell you exactly what the position is"And then comes the simply sublime intervention from Sir Aymas Morse - Comptroller and Auditor General of the National Audit Office - responding to a real sense of flippancy from Willet in that last response.
"That's really great. So you're collecting more information. All we're trying to push you towards is to make sure the information is sufficiently coherent that you know whether the out if hours service is value for money or not. We're not telling you to collect all the info that could possibly be asked for everywhere in the world or things that are burdensome. Just asking you take a logical approach to putting something together that allows you to make good judgements at the centre. Is that fair?"
"And we agree with that" Stevens
Home Affairs Select Committee on Child sexual exploitation in Rotherham .
Tuesday 9 September 2014
Chaired by Keith Vaz and "taking evidence" from the previous Chief Constable.
There's a clue of what's to come in the pre-committee published purpose from Keith Vaz. "The Committee will be questioning those in positions of authority at the time that these offences were being committed on how the sexual exploitation of children on a horrifying scale was allowed to go unchallenged for so long."
Here's some Vaz statements to the previous Chief Constable.
"That's an interesting point. It's not born out by the facts"
"I don't think your treating these proceedings with the respect they deserve".
"How would you know that Mr Hughes, when your telling this committee that you don't know about anything else and can't remember anything else"
"We find your evidence totally unconvincing"And some reference to the data from the previous Chief Constable.
"Improvement"..."That's not some sort of numerical idea". "You look at recorded crime figures you look at the data to establish the problems". There were "good relationships with Local Authorities and others who would bring data to me". "I had no knowledge of this".
