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Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

This Bill has been through so many previous incarnations that it is sometimes difficult to keep up with it. In one of its incarnations, there was a list of various duties that civil servants would be obliged to perform, including the duty""to discharge public functions reasonably and according to law"" and another duty to do with standards of administration. It seems to me that there are two possible logical positions: to set out the duties of civil servants, or to take the Bill's approach and simply to say what are the core values. There is not a case, however, for taking one duty—in this instance, fiduciary responsibility—and seeking to insert it into the Bill without addressing all the other ones. There must be all or nothing, and this is just a gesture in the middle.