14 September 2022: Seedat - A

A large pair of spectacles was enough to set the scene for a civil servant with an apparent office-based paper shuffling role appearing at the Inquiry. Ms Seedat’s evidence was mainly sought due to her work at the Blood Policy Unit. She started her public servant career in a junior administrative role and in the common way she rose through the ranks. She worked under Lister, Gutowski, and Connon. In the Blood Team she did a lot of reactive work, such as responding to MP questions, enquiries from the public, committee work, all around blood issues, but not just contaminated blood. She said it was “probably” a policy role there, but she did not make policy, just supported those who did. She was asked to compare and contrast the styles of her bosses. Lister was the friendly hard working one, Gutowski was more formal, and Connon was the least formal. She said it was by far the busiest team she worked within during her civil servant career. She had a busy and enormous workload. She had some admin support, but mostly she did her own admin. There was a huge postbag of contaminated blood enquiries. Her time included the introduction of the Freedom of Information Act which increased the reactive work.

Counsel reviewed various sections from the document “for the record” which was guidance on record keeping and related admin activities., including archiving. In 1994 there was a memo saying that it was judged necessary to carry out a renewal and re-emphasis of the guidance for record keeping. Interestingly, “files should be closed if they are over 3 cm thick” was one instruction. This writer wonders if they considered weighing them instead as a more accurate way to assess their need for closure. Maybe not.

The Lord Owen allegations about the loss of his ministerial papers, including on self-sufficiency, were referred to in an email that regretted the problems with discovering that they had been destroyed since it would “feed into the hands of the conspiracy theorists”. The witness confirmed that she was not involved in creating the “lines to take”. Next was the associated enquiry from Lord Jenkin seeking information on the “secret Westminster-funded report into haemophilia and Hepatitis non-A non-B”. Jenkin had been Secretary of State for Health during the period when someone asked him about it. They responded by saying there was no document they could identify, but having spoken with Sandra Falconer at the Scottish Executive, there was a report from the Haemophilia Centre Directors Hepatitis Working Party for year 1980-81, which might have been the report enquired about. This highlighted, among other things, how there were documents held by Scotland that were not in Westminster. That was seen as a problem.

The witness was involved in responding to the Lord Jenkin enquiry, including the issues it raised about record keeping. The response noted how an initial communication had come from a general correspondence team who used the lines to take in a non-specific way which Jenkin found unsatisfactory. Lord Warner was the Minister initially responding on behalf of the Government. The response did not mention the discovery of records being destroyed. Ms Seedat mentioned how she drafted the first draft, but often, and especially given that it was an enquiry for a former Minister, her draft would have been approved and possibly changed by a more senior officer before being sent out. It led to a meeting between Lord Jenkin and Nigel Crisp, the most senior civil servant in the Department of Health (DH). Lord Crisp had given evidence earlier in  the week. It was a short meeting, but it did include references to records which had been destroyed and other sources of records held in the other archives. The Chair intervened to seek clarity on the description of “not adequately archived” and how such a misfiled/misplaced document ended up being marked for destruction. Basically, the witness was simply acting and responding based on the information she was given by more senior colleagues.

Lord Jenkin was given access to what papers were available, and supported in doing this by the witness, but Ms Seedat could not remember anything about whether or not Jenkin said anything about destroyed papers not available to him. He was clearly not satisfied and sought another meeting with Crisp. But after more considerations and the discovery of more specific non-discovery of document the briefing included a recommendation to not meet again with Jenkin. The Chair reviewed how all this was going on at a time when the witness was greatly unsupported by colleagues immediately above and below her grade. She was doing the work of those apparently missing additional team members. He is obviously highlighting the potential for errors or incomplete work due to the amount of activity and responsibility the witness was faced with.

It is noted how the witnesses’ manner of responding is very civil-servanty. When she cannot remember something she includes a cowed, apologetic response; “I can’t remember, I’m sorry”, “I can’t recall, I’m afraid”. These are accompanied by her head sinking into her shoulders while softly shaking side-to-side, in the style of saying “no, sorry”. By comparison, Ms Seedat smiles broadly as an appearance of seeking to please people – when that type of positive response is possible. Unfortunately, she seems to have discovered how an actual answer often leads to deeper digging, whereas if she says she cannot recall, she gets off the hook much more lightly. For example, the non-specific statement about destroyed records saying “it should never have happened” did not benefit from the witness having any detail to expand on the phrase being used because she couldn’t remember anything about it. Similarly, the Chair asked about the DH describing the destruction of documents not being a deliberate attempt to get rid of evidence as likely to “disappoint some haemophilia lobby groups”, but again she could not elucidate.

It came out that the DH’s dealing with a request for papers for ongoing litigation purposes was restricted by there being a limit of 3.5 days allocated to search through the HIV Litigation papers. This seems contrary to the ends of justice being served. Surely, if there is a duty to disclose, time has to be allocated to make this happen adequately. In relation to a Freedom of Information request about destroyed documents, a Government lawyer advised the witness that there were legal reasons to justify destroying documents after six years as a way of drawing a line under what was considered to be a settled legal case. Ms Seedat admitted that she may have gotten the various facets of these issues “muddled up”, citing how busy she was as a likely reason. On having the chance to review documents in preparation for preparing her witness statement and oral evidence session, she admitted that some aspects of the situation “troubled me”, particularly having “reflected on it over the weekend”. She was troubled by having not seen the list of missing documents, so could not properly judge if they were relevant or not. Her sense is that she did not give this matter her full attention, or the attention it deserved.

Reference was made to the “Iron Mountain” storage team. This is the same organisation which stores patient records, certainly in Scotland, and maybe further afield. It has been one place people have gone when trying to track down their own patient medical records, not always receiving a satisfactory result.

Then it was time for the morning break.