Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:30 pm on 28 February 2018.
That's right. And, of course, it's the job of this National Assembly to hold our Government to account, and that means all parts of the Government, not just the political parts, but, indeed, the functioning parts—the officials who lie behind the politicians who we debate with here in this National Assembly Chamber. I have to say, I think it was very discourteous of the Permanent Secretary to make statements on the outcome of her inquiry, her work, her investigation into this leak, without actually presenting a formal statement to the National Assembly, to Assembly Members. We had to read about the outcome of this in media reports.
Now, I'm sorry, I just don't think that that is acceptable, and I think we need to better understand, and I think she needs to make herself available to speak to Assembly Members, whether that's privately or in an Assembly committee of some sort, in order to give an account as to how she conducted the inquiry. I think that would be useful. Let's face it, we, as Assembly Members, have private documents shared with us on a regular basis in terms of our committee work and other things that we do. It should be perfectly reasonable, I think, to have the Permanent Secretary appear before a panel of Assembly Members, whether that's the standards committee, or whoever, I don't know, but we need to get to the bottom of what happened, we need to understand how this information got out into the public domain before those people who were being dismissed from the Cabinet actually knew about it.
So, it's an incredible discourtesy to this Assembly not to see a copy of the redacted report. There are redacted reports published by the public sector all of the time on very contentious issues, including things such as the Tawel Fan issue in north Wales, where patients' details were shared—redacted without names. And I think we need a copy of this report in the public domain too.