13 July 2022: Jecock - A

Rowena Jecock came to the civil service from teaching, via some microbiological studies. She had several roles in the Department of Health, in time becoming Head of the CJD team, then Head of Blood Policy, then shifting to an associated role with environmental hazards, but she still kept a hand in blood policy. There was some useful flexibility in the working arrangements during her time at DH. The witness had said in her statement that she has only a limited recollection of the details of the time. The witness has seen some documents but knows there are “underlying” documents she had not seen which may present her with difficulties in giving her evidence. (So, with that “get out of jail” card played so soon, we were prepared for the inevitable ducking and diving. It only made one wonder more pointedly what think she did not want to have to admit to?)

Counsel started with “Miss Jecock” (no, not as a teacher), but as Head of the CJD team. This was under the purview of Public Health. At the time the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) was Liam Donaldson. She was part of the relevant key groups, and these provided valuable sources of information, including SEAC (Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee) and the CJD Incidents Panel, and was part of the process of assembling and disseminating information among senior staff and Ministers. There were times when there was a cut-across to other areas of DH work, such as the concerns over the use of bovine derived products in medicines. An important part of her role was also to link outwith the DH, such as the Foreign Office for relevant contacts in other countries.

The roles of, for example, SEAC was advisory and not decision-making. The aim was to have a variety of voices to allow for debate involving different points of view. Once a year there would be an “open” meeting, but mostly the meetings were held in private to facilitate unfettered discussion, and so the minutes only captured key headings but not verbatim accounts. The aim was for the minutes to include any matters which had been subject to divergent views, without attributing individual contributions to individual attendees.

There had been other panel meetings where the plan was to ensure that any patient who was notified as having been potentially exposed to vCJD would have access to trained NHS syaff to ensure patients received the necessary counselling or other support to deal with such notifications. The witness could not recall any details of these plans beyond what was included in the documents which had been supplied to her by the Inquiry. (This writer was briefly distracted by a silent oncoming phone call – not answered – coming from the “NHS Callout Number”. It was assumed this was to arrange the second blood test to check that the recent DAA anti-viral course of treatment had achieved a sustained viral response, or not, since this is the second course of DAA drugs with the first three-month regimen not having worked.)

The questioning shifted to the witnesses’ role as Head of Blood Policy. Among her responsibilities was the Archer Inquiry. After a change of Government, her ministerial leaders were Ann Milton, then Anna Soubry, then Jane Ellison, then her role no longer involved her in directly being involved with Ministers on blood issues. There were also various changes to the respective Secretary of State post. Counsel sought to explore the effects of the high turnover of Ministers. It had its drawbacks, such as the need to keep bringing new people up to speed. It also meant there was the possibility of a new person seeking to do things differently. It did lay a burden of maintaining “corporate memory” on the civil servants, giving them more influence on what became public policy and decisions since the Ministers were so reliant on them. The Archer Inquiry was among the first issues Ms Jecock had to deal with so there was some need to quickly get up to speed on the issues, but she was aware of the general situation since it was known within the DH before her move to Blood Policy.

The Recommendations from the Archer Inquiry Report were displayed, with Counsel concentrating on Paragraph 6 related to direct financial relief and all the concomitant details such as not requiring means-testing and including a benefits disregard. The DH did not receive an advanced copy, but when she read the recommendations she recognised the wide-ranging impacts it could produce if adopted, including the need to liaise with other Departments, and that it could take as long as three months to make a full response. There was a need for the witness to seek to understand the relevant issues, including previous briefings, but there were not many documents available to her. It did include the self-sufficiency and blood products documents which was later discredited (as described in the evidence of Carol Grayson). Ms Jecock did not question the papers given to her at the time but took them as accurate. The Minister for Public Health was Dawn Primarolo. At the time, it was the protocol for all communications to a Minister to go through a more senior civil servant before being sent. A figure of “£7.5million to £8million” was hand-written on an internal memo, but the witness did not know where this amount came from. It was quickly decided not to see the Archer Report as a reason to revisit the justifications for maintaining the Government position (“line”), despite what responsibilities of Government might be drawn from the Irish Scheme being established.

The Minister did express concern about the issue of contaminated blood and blood products as highlighted in the Archer Report and how these matters were being handled. A swift follow-up communication clarified that the Minister was not criticising the current Blood Policy Team, rather it was the overall and historic era, but all of these candid exchanges were internal. The sense was that the Minister saw this as an important matter (but not important enough to change the line to take, clearly). It placed a great deal of work on Ms Jecock and some tight response deadlines. At such times civil servants “do their best” to meet the demands placed upon them. During all this episode, both at the time or even during the Inquiry questioning, there was no recognition that the fundamental problem was based on the ongoing refusal of Government to hold a Public Inquiry, and then not to engage with the Independent Archer Inquiry. That was surely the real problem.