(7 months, 1 week ago)
Commons ChamberI was going to come to that point. Although the right hon. Gentleman is right that there is currently no public guidance, that does not limit the sharing of knowledge between Departments and policy areas. There is a great deal of dialogue and shared learning between officials when schemes come into existence. The hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord) suggested in his opening remarks that the wheel was always being reinvented. That is not the case; a learning process happens within Government.
I do not suppose that lessons are not being learned and that one set of civil servants is not passing lessons on to another set; rather, this is about victims having the reassurance that when there is a perceived conflict of interest, they have somewhere else to go.
The point I was making was very much that we have internal schemes of learning, and we ensure that each new scheme learns from the experiences of those that have gone before it.