Mr. Ian Drennan:

As the Chairman will be aware, and I think they confirmed this the last day they were here, departmental officials have seen the main report, if one likes, and we have had extensive discussions about it at both senior official level and, as I noted earlier, ministerial level. The Chairman can therefore take it as a given that these issues were factored into the thinking of the senior officials in their ongoing dialogue with the Minister on these heads.

As for the second issue the Deputy raised, that is, the appreciation of the risk and so on, the reality is that if December 2008 happened again in the morning, we would not be equipped to deal with it. Very few organisations in the country would be, though, because that was off the scale in that there were massive lines of inquiry which in turn resulted in the uplifting of hundreds upon thousands, if not millions, of documents, and that organisation at the time, in fairness, had no understanding of what it was walking into because one does not until one goes in. Now we know, though. The risks are enormous, and much more thought would have to go into identifying and appropriately mitigating those risks such that we would not have a repetition of what has happened.