REFLECTIONS ON THE TRUE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SCOTT REPORT FOR GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.1996.tb00885.x |
| Date | 01 December 1996 |
| Published date | 01 December 1996 |
| Author | CHRISTOPHER FOSTER |
REFLECTIONS ON THE TRUE SIGNIFICANCE
OF
THE
SCOTT REPORT FOR GOVERNMENT
ACCOUNTABILITY
CHRISTOCHER
FOSTER
The immediate impact of the Scott report was slight because it had no conclusion
and led to no ministerial or other resignations. Reasons for this inconclusiveness
were examined, including conventions of the judicial process, the difficulty Scott
had in defining the offences he was examining, the slipperiness of those offences
as
constitutional conventions and Scott's lack of grasp of administrative processes.
Yet his report is a mine
of
information on problems
of
accountability in the area
of government defence sales. It was atypical in that three departments pursuing
four policies between them and with another department as policeman had
a
locus
in the process. Given the nearly
100,000
licences being processed at one time, it was
a large, complex and fragmented administrative activity which might easily have
resulted in more mishaps than it did.
Despite its special features the author argues that it does provide evidence of six
areas of difficulty in government accountability which are also of (growing) rele-
vance outside the area Scott surveyed: how one finds who is responsible for policy
an& policy change; how accountability is secured where confidentiality is justified
for national security or other reasons; how one gets operational accountability for
executive operations within departments; the accountability of junior to departmen-
tal ministers; of junior to more senior civil servants; and of civil servants to minis-
ters.
It
is
day-to-day accountability,
in
which the rulers explain and justify
their actions to the ruled, which distinguishes a democratic society from
an elective tyranny (Day and Klein
1987,
p.
7).
After the initial furore, the Scott report' soon disappeared from the news;
but is it of lasting significance for a better understanding of government
accountability? In my opinion the answer is Yes, but not from the con-
clusions which bubbled up in an immediate or superficial reading.
To
find
gold, one must dig deep. But one first needs to understand why the report
took
a
form which made establishing its conclusions
so
difficult and seemed
not to attach clear blame to any single individual.
Its length is the first difficulty, made harder by the structure
of
its argu-
Sir Christopher Foster used to be
a
partner in Coopers
&
Lybrand Associates and remains an adviser
to the Chairman. This paper reflects his own personal opinions.
Public Administration Vol. 74 Winter
1996
(567-592)
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1996, 108
Cowley Road, Oxford
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USA.
568
CHRISTOPHER
FOSTER
ment.
It
is well written and argued. At points the skill shown in disen-
tangling evidence is intellectually enjoyable. But it
is
a connected whole:
like a long complex novel, there is no real alternative to reading it from
start to finish. In a world in which most read only executive summaries
and not the books and documents themselves, this was an appalling block
to its wide appreciation, not helped by the indefensibly short time Oppo-
sition spokesmen were given to extract its plums. (In the circumstances,
Robin Cook's ability to gut
1800
pages in three hours and to get it
so
right,
amounts to sheer geniys; but inevitably he concentrated on issues of per-
sonalities and politics rather than the more structural issues of account-
ability discussed here.)
However, that omission of an executive summary must have been delib-
erate and, though not defended in the report, may be understood by ana-
logy with many other records of judicial and quasi-judicial proceedings.
More than 97 per cent of the report consists of summaries of the volumin-
ous
evidence presented to it, taken apart and re-ordered to illuminate the
various issues considered and to determine what offences had been com-
mitted. Scott did not start with a case (Scott 1996,
B3,
C1): cases, possible
offences, appeared as he went along (Scott 1996,
K1.3).
With minor excep-
tions (for example, Scott 1996, C3), the offences he found were not breaking
the law, rather the infringement of what he sees as established parliamen-
tary conventions or constitutional principles (for example, Scott 1996, (3.26,
33,
111,
D1.165) and in some circumstances of what lawyers call natural
justice (Craig 1989, part
2),
as well as in the case of Alan Clark, though he
does not put it like this, ordinary reasonably consistent behaviour. At every
turn of the argument there are the judge's observations on the value and
truth of that evidence and the extent to which one piece of evidence sup-
ports
or
contradicts another. From these remarks were drawn the criticisms
of ministers and civil servants on which the Press seized and which were
volleyed back and forth across the floor of the House of Commons, albeit
inconclusively in February 1996. Whether the context is actually judicial or,
as here quasi-judicial, lawyers presiding over such proceedings know well
the threat of judicial review that would arise if they were to re-summarize
their summaries of evidence.
So
they do not do
it.
In this instance the pro-
cedures he adopted meant Scott had enough problems getting some wit-
nesses to agree to his summaries of their evidence without his tempting
fate by attempting to summarize those summaries with or without their
further agreement, even if he had wanted to, which as a punctilious judge
he would have known to be improper behaviour.
Nevertheless, Scott did not have to summarize the massive evidence put
to him. Almost all similar inquiries into the workings of government
-
Denning, Radcliffe, even most recently by Bingham into
BCCI
-
have not
done
so.
If he had followed their model, his report need hardly have been
much longer than his final fifty pages of recommendations or less:
if
he
had been content to explain why the Matrix Churchill prosecution was
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