Mr. Aidan O'Driscoll:

I agree with the Deputy concerning the broad remit of the Department. As he knows, I joined the Department a little over a year ago from another Department, which also had a fairly broad remit. I was still quite staggered by the breadth of issues in which the Department is involved. In the new organisational design, we have established two pillars, as we are calling them, under each deputy secretary. These bring together all of the many functions that arise under criminal justice under one deputy secretary and the equality, civil justice and immigration issues under another. We have a policy function in each of these areas. There is real virtue, in those policy functions, in having a broad remit. There is learning from experience from one area to another and those policy functions are evidence-based across the entire platform with which they are dealing. As someone once said, everything is eventually connected to everything else. There is real virtue in having that breadth of perspective. Equally, there is virtue in dividing the responsibilities up into those two pillars. We have chosen, as may be noticed from the design, to have one transparency function stretching across the whole Department. One motivation for that is that we found that there are learnings from one area of the Department to the other, even across those two pillars. We do not want to lose that opportunity either.

The short answer to the Deputy's question is that I believe that having a broad range of functions within the Department is a good thing. I see substantial benefits accruing. I accept, however, that it is also a challenge and that challenge is reflected in our new structure.