THE PRESS MONDAY, OCTOBER 25, 1982. Leaked department papers

Press, 25 October 1982, Page 12

THE PRESS MONDAY, OCTOBER 25, 1982. Leaked department papers

The public is entitled to assume that Labour’s spokeswoman on consumer affairs, Mrs Ann Hercus, is influenced by the best motives when she questions the success in enforcing the freeze on prices. Mrs Hercus’s specific field of concern no doubt encourages her, on behalf of consumers, to ensure that the freeze is as effective as possible. Her worry that the staff of the Commerce Division of the Department of Trade and Industry, who are responsible for enforcing the freeze, have been put under additional strain appears genuine. Her fear that the division’s other work is suffering while staff concentrate on the additional task the freeze has created is reasonable.

Mrs Hercus’s reliance on notes of a meeting of officials two months ago to support her case is another matter. How Mrs Hercus came to have a copy of the notes is not known. No-one in the department could have doubted the political use to which they would be put if they were leaked to a member of the Opposition. If the leak is the result of a State employee’s deliberate actions, it would be just another instance of politically-motivated breach of trust. Unhappily such instances have become common.

Controversy about the manner, in which the notes became public threatens to cloud a more important issue: what weights can be placed on them and whether they merit the importance that Mrs Hercus attaches to them. The notes Mrs Hercus has issued to reporters are written in very general terms. They speak of staff being “overwhelmed by an avalanche of paperwork,” of a “general feeling of despair” in the Commerce Division and say that “staff realise that in due course the regulations will be impossible to police.” No figures or evidence are included to substantiate these generalisations. These views, possibly were genuinely held by some officials at the time the notes were written. That was two months ago when the freeze had been in force for only

a matter of weeks and when the division must have been in some chaos coming to grips with such a complicated and wideranging measure. Assurances given by senior officials in the department this week, and by the Minister of Trade and Industry, Mr Templeton, should carry more weight than notes made in August, when trying to assess the state of affairs in October.

More damaging to the credence Mrs Hercus would have the public put in the notes is the statement by Mr Templeton that they are inaccurate and that the comments about despair were not accepted by the meeting at which they were made. Mr Templeton is supported by the Acting Secretary of Trade and Industry, Mr D. E. Homewood, who has said that at no stage did the department consider it could not cope with the freeze. Mr Homewood said that the notes presented a totally misleading impression of the department’s experience with the freeze to date. Initial difficulties had been substantially resolved by the appointment of new staff, he said. Those difficulties might have prompted some of the comments to which the notes refer; both the difficulties and the comments appear to have been superseded by the events of the intervening two months.

Mrs Hercus used her access to the notes as an opportunity to ask three questions of Mr Templeton in the House. Mr Templeton answered these questions but, because the answers gave the lie to the general comments in the notes, Mrs Hercus chose to release a copy of them. Mrs Hercus appears to want the public to put more stock in a document that has been challenged as inaccurate and outdated than in the word of the man in change of the department whose correctness in publicly describing the work of his officers should not lightly be disputed. What one note-taker thought two months ago, and what is not accepted by the department’s head, does not seem sound evidence on which to base such a challenge to a person’s reliability.