Wanless Review

Sheila Gilmore Excerpts

Tuesday 11th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I am afraid that Governments spend a lot of time working with paper-based methods. Indeed, much of the material available to Government is still paper-based, rather than in digital form. Obviously, increasingly the balance is changing, but the records kept at that time were almost invariably in paper form. Indeed, many records are still kept in paper form.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

Does the Home Secretary have any lessons from this inquiry with which to reassure people about the wider inquiry, given the apparent absence of good record keeping in the past? How will people be kept on board so that they have trust in the process, rather than awaiting something and then, at the end, crying, “No, that can’t be right”?

[Mrs May]

The hon. Lady makes an important point. It will be for the inquiry panel to determine how it is going to report, how frequently it will report, and in what form it will report the work that it does. My personal view is that because of the nature of these issues, the comprehensive nature of its work, and the need for confidence in it that she mentioned, I would like it to report to people on a fairly regular basis so that it can show what it is doing. Indeed, there may be a benefit to that, because if it reports on a piece of work that it has done on, say, identifying a certain set of institutions, that may trigger other people to come forward with further evidence. This will be a matter for the inquiry panel, but I have made clear my view that they should be doing it regularly.