THE DEFENCE COMMITTEE
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security involved in this; and even if there were, we would, as always, be prepared to take classified evidence.
12. The Ministry's refusal to answer on policy options caused us greater difficulty. We were told that the conventions of giving evidence to Select Committees prevented our being given information about policy options,' and the Ministry was prepared to answer only "in respect of factual material, and where there is an existing Government policy".2
13. We recognise no 'convention' that Select Committees should not be told about options for future policy. We emphasise that in our inquiry we were not seeking to know the advice which officials give to Ministers, but to discover the financial, administrative and policy implications of options for the future of the Brigade of Gurkhas. We do not accept that the Government should attempt to shield matters from Parliamentary scrutiny merely because Ministers may later require advice on those matters, or because decisions have yet to be taken.
14. The Ministry put particular difficulties in our way when we attempted to discover, as a question of fact, whether the Government had investigated the possibility of deploying Gurkhas to a country where they had not so far been stationed. Our exchanges with the MoD are set out in Appendix E, and give a flavour of the sort of difficulty we encountered both here and elsewhere in our inquiry. No Minister or Permanent Secretary would for a moment themselves tolerate such answers from the Department; but such answers are evidently thought good enough for the House of Commons. Apart from the issue of principle involved, evidence of this sort is counter-productive, serving only to engender suspicion about the Ministry's actions.
15. We are well aware that the Ministry of Defence would prefer to restrict our scrutiny of its decision-making. The Ministry has made it clear that it does not welcome investigation of the options to be considered before a decision is taken. We do not accept that the role of a Select Committee in examining a Government decision should be confined to conducting a post mortem. There is clear advantage to the House and to the taxpayer in an inquiry which explores all the options open to the Government before those options are closed off. Despite the obstacles which have been placed in our way, we have every intention of continuing to investigate issues of importance before the Government reaches irrevocable decisions.
See, for example, Q 5 and Appendix E.
2 Evidence, p. 1.