29 July 2022: Deacon - A

On the last day before the summer holidays, it was the turn of Susan Deacon to give evidence. She was the first Cabinet Secretary for Health (ie. Minister) in the Scottish Parliament. On leaving politics she went into academia, was a Director of the Pfizer UK charity (ooooh), the Institute of Occupational Medicine, and most recently is the top civilian with Police Scotland. She bemoaned not having access to her Ministerial Diaries to help her complete her written Statement. She had one Junior Minister working with her while in post. Her role was “Health”, and the Junior role was “Community Care”. Counsel quickly got the common introductory question for Scottish connected witnesses out of the way, by eliciting the response that Ms Deacon was not called to give evidence to the Penrose Inquiry (… why not? Despite this not being an Inquiry about an Inquiry, “Lord” – it pains to use that title – Penrose sure has a lot to answer for with his six years and over £12million in public money to produce one measly Recommendation).

As a Minister in the new body, Ms Deacon explained how the Scottish Parliament spent the first period of time in setting up and taking on the powers now devolved. After that period was over, she did not have many reasons to be in contact with the UK Scotland Minister. That was more likely a connection for the First Minister to make (Donald Dewar at the time, he of the traffic cone on his statue’s head). The witness had no contact with the Treasury. The levels of interface with the UK was high at the start, all as part of the handover, but it lessened over time. This was both for Ministers and officials. She could not say for sure, but thought there were pre-existing relationships between officials, and they had to work out the new way of working between themselves, but she could not say for sure about the actualities.

The key purpose for Devolution was to increase accountability from the far-distanced UK Departments to their closer new positioning in Edinburgh. It was “a real time of change and flux”, and she did not think there was enough thinking about what the new way should look like. There was very little scrutiny of Scottish matters under the Westminster model, whereas after Devolution the scrutiny increased enormously. It was a struggle at first for people to get used to that. It “wasn’t just business as usual because it couldn’t be”, she said. There were about 13 or 14 people who had been MPs in Westminster, but everyone else was making it up as they went along, passing through the learning process as it happened. By comparison, those MPs had to “unlearn” the Westminster ways. She said everyone recognised how it was an immense privilege to have been involved in setting up a new Parliament.

On the thinking about setting policy for the Scottish Executive, it could not be a case of simply adopting the UK Labour position, especially since in Scotland the first Parliament was a coalition (Labour and Lib Dem). There was also a sense of having to demonstrate how the new Parliament was serious and significant. Policy was firstly thought of in terms of being “devolved” or “reserved” powers, but it was not as simple as that. There were issues of working together, for example using the Sewell Convention to settle situations where the powers bumped into each-other. These are now called Legislative Consent Motions. There were and are certain matters that require working across the UK, she said.

A ”Green Folder” was a place for matters which the Minister had to deal with. One of the first of these was the call for financial support for people infected and affected by NHS contaminated blood. The content said the matter had been rigorously investigated and the Haemophilia Society had not put forward any new evidence, so the briefing was advising Ms Deacon to not accept the call for financial support. In context, it was happening at the point two weeks after the actual devolved powers had transferred to Scotland. She had a mountain of material to deal with, but she recalled the displayed briefing due to her frustration at the language of “following a predecessor” and sticking with what was decided by “the previous administration”. Beyond the matter at hand, it illustrated for the witness how more generally the thinking was lacking and needed to change. She was “irritated and disappointed” by that choice of language. It was just one letter among so many, but it caused the witness to seek for things to be done differently. The witnesses’ response was to go against the advice.

Ms Deacon recognised how the Contaminated Blood matter had been around for a long time, long before the Scottish Parliament. It was an issue well advocated for by the Haemophilia Society and was on the minds of a number of MSPs. Returning to the briefing, she did not respond immediately because she felt something had to be done but was also concerned to not set something off which would have ramifications without her understanding enough about the issues.

A BBC programme was in the offing, so in preparation for it a further briefing was prepared with the usual “lines to take” (sticking with the Westminster wording). It included the usual suspects of no negligence, best treatment available, etc. It also used language the witness saw, like before, was part of the bigger issue of the paternalistic approach being applied by officials. The BBC had a quote saying it was revealing new evidence provided by the Haemophilia Society specifically about how things were done in Scotland. This was seen as something she as Minister could address, and to do so in a better way than just by standing up and saying a few lines of reassurance; as the officials expected her to do. It came as no surprise to note the names of Keel and Towers on the document circulation list.

The witness wanted to start from a basis of facts, even if the facts were disputed. She wanted to speak to the Haemophilia Society, but there was an element more generally of “protecting” the Minister (from herself or from being influenced?, as the officials might have thought, which probably counted as the same thing.) In her view after 20 years, setting up an investigation was the right thing to do as a starting point. She noted that there was also interest on the matter from the Health Committee. After describing the background, the witness made a face when recognising that the Inquiry would move on to the actual investigation; suggesting she knew that was going to be a bit awkward.

Michael Palmer was drafting the briefings and the names of the familiar faces continued to pop up, specifically those who had been in place pre-Devolution and seemed to want things to go the way they had gone before. It was well known how much bad form it is seen to be for a politician to criticise civil servants, but surely it was only a matter of time before Prof Keel was thrown under the proverbial bus to save the reputational skin of the witness who still holds a high public role. It may have started when Ms Deacon spoke about not criticising individuals because it was just the  normal practice, but the witness admitted that “Apart from going toe-to-toe with her … many of us just said ‘Thank you’”, (… did the witness say, “with her”?), and if so, who could she be referring to?

A meeting was held including Karin Pappenheim of the Haemophilia Society. It caused Ms Deacon to wonder what was possible when this UK matter took on a Scottish face. She wanted to try to do  something, even if that was simply to “shed a bit of light” on the issue. This led to the initiating of the internal investigation (sometimes unhelpfully referred to as an inquiry) on the specific issue as raised by the Haemophilia Society (ie, people being given infected SNBTS blood and then not being told about it even being a risk). The initial hope was for a month-long investigation, but it had to be extended as it kept becoming bigger and bigger, including stretching into non-Scottish only matters. There had also been two petitions submitted. The witness wanted to say something despite the capacity and competence limitations being hampered by the growing size of the issue. It seemed like the witness was preparing the ground for responding to some challenging and uncomfortable statements from her and her colleagues (… thinking about the PR exercise quote, perhaps).

The Chair sought clarity on the statement in a document about what was “the issue” referred to as, “of which we already knew the outcome”. The witness wanted to revert back to talking about the context of everyone being new in a new setting. The Chair wanted an answer to his question. She said she totally understood the question but went into how they wanted to keep it from getting as big as it was becoming. If nothing else, the witness was giving the best possible justification for holding a Public Inquiry back then. But she didn’t do it. There were so many people saying “we know that, it’s done.” The Chair reflected back the “answer” and asked, “Is that what you are attempting to say?” (Sting!) When she didn’t give a clear answer, Sir Brian simply responded, “Thank you” as if he was not directing that to the witness. She must have thought she was getting off lightly with her mini-lecture series on the history of the Scottish Parliament. Sadly, (for her) she was not because she had come up against bigger brains than hers.