14 September 2022: Seedat - B

Counsel returned with Ms Seedat to the issue of FOI requests. Another limiting factor to achieving a satisfactory response was mentioned that there was a budget of £600 allocated to redacting documents prior to releasing them. It may suggest there could be benefit by making a series of smaller FOI requests rather than one big request; assuming the possibly arbitrary rule of £600 is allocated for each individual request. This writer wonders if the previously mentioned 3.5 days and the £600 amount is a budgetary equivalence.

The Chair sought to clarify the difference between SOL (Government lawyers) having a “clear out”, which may imply they were destroying papers in the process, or documents being sent to a storage facility as a way of clearing space. He said the lack of clarity simply added to the confusion over what actually happened to the various paperwork.

An enquiry was made to the DRO Nelson storage facility about information of records stored and destroyed. “Dockets” there simply recorded how certain weights of files were actually destroyed. The witness had hoped to at least have a list of document titles that might have been destroyed. Documents are normally destroyed by the DRO when the last document included in the file was either two or five year old and not otherwise marked for retention for longer.

Authorisation to destroy documents had been listed as to be done by someone at the Executive Officer (EO) Grade, but Ms Seedat thought it should be above that. In her view the EO Grade is not sufficiently senior since EOs were not routinely copied into key communications. One issue was the question over whether the destruction, for example of the GEB files, was carried out by a lower-grade officer, or if the marking on the files of a destruction date was placed on the box by a lower-grade officer.

The Bergin Report on what happened about self-sufficiency was due out in February 2006 and it was noted how there were still unanswered questions about missing documents. The witness could not recall any discussions about these. There may have been pressure to publish the report since it had taken so long, but there was also pressure to pause the release of the report until the questions about destroyed records were further explored. There were a series of questions around these topics, including that there may have been a reluctance to have discovered copies of missing documents sent to the DH,  but mostly the responses to these questions by the witness were a series of, “I don’t knows”. Ms Seedat did have some involvement in the report, including the liaison with Prof Zuckerman, the UKHCDO, and others. She thinks this might have been to see if they had any views on the “findings” of the report. These were the experts, after all.

There seems to have been a series of follow-up questions from politicians, former politicians, and campaigners which picked holes in previous Government responses or documents it had issued. Ms Seedat bore the brunt of responsibility to respond to these, although some were directly written by her senior colleagues. On occasion, replies were received that people simply did not believe what they were being told by way of explanations. The next battle was about the release of documents. Pressure was growing after documents from Scotland were released, but it was highlighted that this had involved employing additional staff, with all the associated extra costs. So, here was another example of justice potentially being denied on the basis that there was not a budget amount to cover the cost of doing something. By this stage the statement that “there was no deliberate attempt to destroy records” had become a line to take.

Ms Seedat had previously suggested that a comprehensive list of missing documents should be compiled, but it was quite a while later when a more senior person made the suggestion that efforts were eventually (belatedly) made to do this. Prior to that, people had been working blind when they didn’t really need to be. Linda Page (supported by Patrick Hennesay) was appointed to carry out the work to compile a list. The witness was not involved in that work. It was by then deemed useful to have an investigation into these matters since the Government had convinced itself that it was confident it had done nothing deliberately wrong. They thought it didn’t need to be a Public Inquiry level of investigation; bearing in mind the rising number of calls for a Public Inquiry to cover the wider contaminated blood issues. One of the displayed documents mentioned the existence of a “Section 12” provision to override the £600 limit as previously mentioned. (So, they can find the money when they want to.) At the same time as this was going on there was an office move involving the witnesses’ team. This became another justification for matters being allowed to drift or not be given the focus required. Inconveniently, a newspaper report mentioned 47 newly discovered files previously thought to be lost. They were “discovered” in a cabinet, but the witness could not recall the circumstances surrounding this latest finding. There were, as might be expected, many cabinets and drawers used by the many teams in the office building, and nobody had come across these previously. This begs the question, “What was the operant issue which caused the problem of lost records; was it incompetence, clandestineness, incapacity, lack of collective conscientiousness, or something else?”

Reference was made to the suggestion, including from Andy Burnham, that too often civil servants are resistant to change or challenge. This includes them sticking to lines to take without reviewing these stock statements to check they were still appropriate. The witness said she personally did not question the lines to take once these were given to her. Her sense was that each team had its work to do and usually this was constant and unrelenting. There was not the time to notice a serendipitous encounter with a different matter than the usually pressing one you were currently dealing with, so it just wouldn’t happen.

The lunch break was doubled-up with the need to collect additional questions from core participants, since Counsel had asked all the questions prepared for this witness, and there was to be another witness in the afternoon.