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Honours System (Reform)

: The distinction is between those who can nominate and those who make awards. It is perfectly proper for Departments to make nominations, because they are often the ones who know best what is going on. The key point is who receives the nomination and who makes the reward. While we were conducting our inquiry the Government set up their own inquiry under Sir Hayden Phillips, who is turning out to be a jack of all trades on such reform. We had a good relationship with Sir Hayden as he was making his report. He produced a report on behalf of the Government, which they later largely accepted, that took on board some of these points. His report said that all we needed to do was have more external people on the awarding committees and more transparency about who they are, and that that would produce greater public confidence in the system. In that sense, the Government have responded to some of the issues and put in place their own reforms. My view is that the Government's response was a halfway house. It would have been much better to take a proper, comprehensive look at the whole system, not just to tidy up the edges that are causing difficulty at the time, as a mandarin might do.