Mr Richard Caborn

CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE    To be published as HC 691

HOUSE OF COMMONS

ORAL EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE THE

STANDARDS AND PRIVILEGES COMMITTEE

MR RICHARD CABORN

TUESDAY 14 DECEMBER 2010

MR RICHARD CABORN

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Standards and Privileges Committee

on Tuesday 14 December 2010

Members present:

Mr Kevin Barron (Chair)

Sir Paul Beresford

Tom Blenkinsop

Annette Brooke

Mr Tom Clarke

Matthew Hancock

Mr Oliver Heald

Heather Wheeler

Dr Alan Whitehead

Examination of Witness

Witness: Mr Richard Caborn gave evidence.

Q1 Chair: Welcome to the Committee, Mr Caborn. I want to remind you that, although the meeting is being held in private, a full transcript is being taken. The evidence will be published in full. We have your recent letter of 12 December to the Committee as well. I don’t know if you’ve got anything immediately that you want to say.

Mr Caborn: First, I would like to thank you for letting me come to your Committee. It is a great relief. My evidence will show why it is a great relief. I would like to spend a few minutes giving the background to the reasons why I am here and the case that you are considering, if that is possible.

Q2 Chair: Okay, provided you do that briefly, because we will want to ask questions.

Mr Caborn: Can I say-I mean this very genuinely-thanks for letting me give evidence, because my reputation and my integrity have been put on the line in a way that I have not experienced in 31 years as an elected representative. It started 10 months ago when The Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches set out to entrap a number of parliamentarians. I don’t want to go into that other than to say that the very serious allegations that The Sunday Times accused me of-contract fixing, fixing legislation and, very importantly indeed in the letter it sent to me, bringing this House into disrepute-have been proved wrong on all three counts. I thank very much both the Commissioner for his conclusions and the recommendations that you have made. That has clearly been put to bed, because I was found not guilty on all counts.

Bringing Parliament into disrepute is a very serious charge after serving 27 years in this House. I served not only in Government for 10 years but in Parliament as well when I served on Select Committees. For four years I was Chairman of the Trade and Industry Committee. Also, importantly, I did 14 years as a trustee of the Industry and Parliament Trust. I don’t want to go into it, but it shows that I believe that bringing wealth creators and this place together more effectively is important in the longer term. At no time did my actions throughout the whole of those 27 years bring this House into disrepute. On the contrary, the work that I have done has enhanced and not diminished Parliament.

It was after 10 months of an inquiry, after the allegations that were made in The Sunday Times, that your Clerk sent me a letter on 24 November. He wrote asking for my observations on the Commissioner’s memorandum. I let you have those on 28 November. I said in that letter that I agreed with the Commissioner’s findings, except in one area, which was item 6-health and wellness in Sheffield. I will come back to that later, if I may. But I did thank the Commissioner for his conclusions and the way in which the Committee had dealt with the issues. The Commissioner said, "I have no evidence that any of these breaches was caused by deliberate intention: it was more likely that they were the result of careless oversight. They were therefore less serious on that account. In this comparatively limited respect, I uphold the complaint against him."

I was therefore very shocked when, at 10 o’clock on Thursday 10 December, I picked up my report. I asked your Clerk whether the recommendations and the conclusions had changed, and he said no. I suppose the question should have been, did the punishment actually fit the crime, because that is where I disagreed. I can honestly tell you that, to be put into the same category as those who had actually brought the House into disrepute, was a shock. I read your findings in the report, and I want to say to the Committee that the world outside is not distinguishing between the removal of a parliamentary pass and the removal of a parliamentary photo pass.

I can assure you that the media, television and radio made it clear that I had been put into the class of bringing Parliament into disrepute. That is why I immediately came to your Clerk and said, "Is there any right of appeal?" After that punishment had been delivered, which I personally believe was unfair, I asked whether there was a right of appeal and the answer was no. But I’m here today and I thank you very much for that. I put down my reasons in a letter of 12 December that you’ve got. If I can just very quickly go through that, I think this is the area where there may be some misunderstanding and some doubt.

First, I sit on a committee for ex-Members. If there are issues like mine in future, I think there ought to be a right of appeal. I think, quite honestly, that that is something that the Committee ought to look at. On the withdrawal of the pass, which is a new sanction, the public consequences are considerable. It really is classed in the public’s eye as a suspension from the House. But what I would really like to know is how, after 27 years in the House, we came to this. I’ve spoken to Members and I’ve looked back. When Members have transgressed in one way or another, the normal course of events, general approach and convention have been that, where there have been no rules broken and no breach, there’s been no action. Where rules were breached, but not intentionally and not bringing the House into disrepute, there was a written or oral apology to the House, depending on the circumstances. When rules were found to be deliberately broken and the House brought into disrepute, there was an apology to the House and a suspension from the House. What I couldn’t understand is why I had been found guilty of B but given a punishment of C.

Can I turn to where there has been some misunderstanding between myself and the interpretation of the Commissioner? In paragraph 711 of the Commissioner’s memorandum to you, on the Guide to the Rules, he says: "I recognise that the strict terms of the Guide to the Rules appear only to require the declaration of an interest to Ministers or Crown servants, including executive agencies. The Chairman of a health authority does not come into either of those categories. Nevertheless, the Guide to the Rules is not a legal document and Members are expected to abide by both the spirit as well as the letter of the rules. And I note that…the requirement to declare a relevant interest extends to meetings with ‘public officials’." As I put in my letter, I think the whole of that sentence, in the context of discussing my case, is important. It reads: "The requirement to declare a relevant interest at the appropriate time covers almost every aspect of a Member’s parliamentary duties extending to correspondence and meetings with Ministers and public officials."

I have also noted, Mr Barron, that you say in the report, in paragraph 74 on the wider review, under "Meetings with officials", that "the terms in which the present advocacy rule is expressed have caused us"-your Committee-"some concern." You go on: "we do feel that it would be helpful if the rule and associated guidance were clarified and, in due course, amended." Clearly, therefore, from both the Commissioner and your Committee’s recommendations, the interpretation of the difference between the rules and the Guide to the Rules needs to be clarified.

If I may say so, you put a lot of weight in your report on paragraphs 62 and 63. The last two sentences of paragraph 62-while this is a detail, it is an important detail that I ought to clear up-state: "He also told the undercover reporter that the proposal would benefit the FIA’s bottom line. We return later in this Report to the question of whether the rule itself could be better expressed." You go on, putting weight on that in your findings: "We agree with the Commissioner that Mr Caborn should have declared his financial interest when he first discussed with the Chairman of a health authority" a proposal on which that interest affected the bottom line.

Can I refer, because I think it is an important detail, to footnote 83, on the bottom of that page: "Appendix 1…00:41:41-00:45:55"? If I can deal with 00:41:41, which is about the time when I was speaking to David Stone about the development of a wellness agenda in Sheffield? I say at 00:41:41, about three paragraphs down: "And because I’m sort of finishing"-I was finishing as a Member of Parliament-"I said you know I’d like to do this experiment." If you then go down to 00:43:00, and this is the linkage between the health authority and Parliament, as the Commissioner says, I said that we need to have an "amendment on the legislation to give us" the powers to be able to do that in the event of that taking place.

On the bottom line, at 00:43:33, I said: "So it’s a win-win at the bottom line. It’s a win-win on the bottom line at expenditure and you believe a cultural shift." My reference there was very clearly about changing to prevention rather than cure. That was talking about the £100 billion on health service expenditure. Part of that could well have been reduced if we had prevention rather than cure-that was the whole idea of discussing it.

I turn over the page to 00:45:55, where I am talking about benefiting the FIA’s bottom line. I say: "There’s a lot, lot of ideas, certainly from their point of view it really is…improving their bottom line that’s what they’re in business for, if they can do that then, with a social aspect to it as well, then it’s a win-win situation."

I refer you to 00:44:41, because the context had changed. In the context in which I referred to the FIA’s bottom line, not the expenditure of the Department of Health, I say, "So that yes, I have been advising the FIA", which I had-prior to the Stone meeting and after the Stone meeting. From 00:44:41 to 00:45:55 is in the context of my ongoing discussions with the FIA about how to use its latent assets more effectively; it did not refer back to 00:41:41 down to 00:43:33, so there are two contexts here.

The context in which I was having the discussion with Stone and the health authority concerned a wellness agenda and reducing the expenditure of the Department of Health. I went on further to say that I was advising the FIA on trying to use its facilities more effectively, which was happening before and has gone on since the meeting with Stone.

If I could come back and, in that context, deal with the three areas in the rules of the commission-the appropriate time, parliamentary duties and public office. I genuinely say to the Committee, this is how I approached it: I never believed that public officials were non-civil servants. Stone, although a powerful man as the chairman of the health authority, has no locus at all in terms of legislation. My genuine understanding, which may well change in the light of your review, is that public officials were those who had power, authority and influence over change in legislation in this place. Therefore, in terms of parliamentary duties-which, again I raised in my letter to you, twice-when are you a constituency MP and when are you a parliamentarian?

My view was that the meeting with Stone and the health authority in Sheffield-my constituency-was to have a discussion with Stone about the wellness. In fact, I put that in the reasons in this letter-which he is prepared to put in writing, by the way. Had that discussion gone further at the appropriate time, and gone into influencing the legislative programme, that would have been my interpretation of the appropriate time.

Therefore, I believe that it is a difference of opinion about the definition of public officials. I was working to the public officials, as the commissioner has said, as being Ministers and servants of the Crown. The context changes considerably when you start talking about officials as being chief executives of local authorities or chairmen of health authorities. I have taken the former, not the latter. If I am wrong on that, that was my mistake, but it was not done deliberately.

In terms of parliamentary duties, I just asked the question-concerning what is a constituency duty and what is a parliamentary duty-is there a difference there? I believe that in this case there was. I believed that Stone had asked me to go as a constituency MP, to discuss constituency issues which were germane to Sheffield. But had they then got into a proper proposition and that needed to be taken forward, that would have been the appropriate time in which to trigger any declaration that I had and so on. That is true for any MP. So, what we are doing here, is not talking about Richard Caborn, ex-MP, but anyone who might get themselves into this area, where we need to have a clear definition. Then, as I say, at the appropriate time, I can give my reasons for that.

I went back to David Stone, who is a very honourable man and of great standing in Sheffield, and said, "Will you please, David, tell me what you believed you called me to that meeting for?" And he said it was to ask whether I believed it was worth setting up a discussion group within the city of Sheffield to look at how the wellness of the population could be enhanced if certain actions were taken and, secondly, whether I would be involved in and possibly chair a working group-after I had left Parliament, which I had already announced. This was because of my knowledge of Sheffield and my experience as a former Sports Minister. The time lapse on this was about eight to 10 weeks before the general election, in which I had declared that I would not be standing.

That is where my explanation is. That is where I come from. I can only say that I was shocked-honestly shocked-that after 27 years in this House I had been accused, effectively, of bringing the House into disrepute.

I will just mention the last two things that happened to me in the constituency. First, Forgemasters invited me to a dinner with all my parliamentary colleagues and gave me a little forging press-Forgemasters is quite interested in forging presses-which said on it, "To a most respected Minister and a true friend of Forgemasters." Then the paper in Sheffield, after 27 years of service, ran this headline that I am showing to the Committee. [1] That hurt me and my wife more than anything else. If ever my wife has been really affected, in 27 years of my service or 43 years of marriage, that headline has done more damage than anything else. Our integrity has been massively undermined and, I say to you, wrongly.

Q3 Chair: Thank you for that. I assume, on that basis, it is the sanction that is the issue. Obviously, I will want to throw it open to other members of the Committee to ask questions, but the A, B, C that you refer to-you said that you felt that was the general rule on how people had interpreted it. Just tell us a bit more about that. We don’t find these rules anywhere.

Mr Caborn: I don’t believe there are any rules. I am just stating the convention-as I think I said in my letter-as I understand it. I have asked a number of people around the place if anyone has been expelled for unknowingly or unwittingly breaking rules, but not bringing the House into disrepute. The answer to that is, no, there never has been-to the best of my knowledge. Someone might be able to prove me wrong, but I asked a number of people who have been in the House a long time, and I know of no case in which an MP’s pass was taken off them for an infringement that was deemed not to have been done deliberately. For that, there are three fairly thick paragraphs: if you are found not guilty, no action; but if you have broken the rules, you go and apologise to the House, in one form or another; if you break the rules deliberately, your pass is taken off you.

Chair: Do members have questions for Mr Caborn?

Q4 Mr Clarke: First, I thank Mr Caborn for coming to the Committee. I regret that I wasn’t able to be here at the meeting, because I think we know that Scotland was snowed in till last Wednesday evening. But perhaps there are two issues that I would like Mr Caborn to help clarify. One is the meeting with the health board chair. Certainly I have been to a number of these meetings and do not regard that as an issue that has to be declared. What was he chair of?

Mr Caborn: The Sheffield Health Trust-I think wrongly we have in this report that it’s the health authority, but it’s actually a trust, and has the freedoms of a trust now.

Q5 Mr Clarke: And he was able to tell you before the meeting broadly what the agenda was going to be.

Mr Caborn: No.

Q6 Mr Clarke: So you had no knowledge whatsoever.

Mr Caborn: No. He invited me to lunch, and I can tell you the reason why he didn’t tell me-he thought I wouldn’t be involved because he was going to ask me to do a job. That is what he said to me, because he wanted me to chair what he called the wellness council. So, I didn’t know before I went to that meeting what it was about. I just got a telephone call to my office.

If I can say so, Mr Clarke, I think there is the interpretation of friendship. My friendship with Mr Stone goes back a long, long way. I have not only discussed the questions that he asked me to on wellness; we’ve also discussed how we could develop the medipark in Sheffield, which we’ve done quite successfully. We now have 2,500 people employed in a medipark. We are bringing industry and the intellectual property of our hospitals and our university together to create a medipark. We have now exported 85% of all the implants that we make in Sheffield, whether implants for knees or whatever. That has brought the best steels of Sheffield, the best engineering and the medical profession together. That is the medipark. That is one issue.

The other issue I was discussing at that time was rebuilding the Sheffield children’s hospital, which Mr Stone was deeply involved in because of the lease of land and the like. I was discussing that with him. That was one of the issues. People say there is something when it’s said I’ve had 35 years of friendship with Mr Stone. I have had 35 years of friendship and a working relationship with Mr Stone, and I believe he and I-and others-have been able to enhance the quality of life of Sheffielders considerably.

Q7 Mr Clarke: Thank you. I have a second question, if I may, Mr Barron. I would like to quote what my colleagues-I say this with great respect to all of them-agreed in paragraph 63, at the end of the report. The report says:

"The fact that the official whom he was meeting was a contact of long standing and also a constituent has no bearing on the question of declaration. Mr Caborn accepts that he also committed further breaches, in that he failed to declare an interest on several occasions when arranging or taking part in events on the Parliamentary estate."

However, crucially, the paragraph ends:

"Mr Caborn did not bring the House or its Members generally into disrepute."

Would you like to comment on what I have just quoted?

Mr Caborn: I think I have in the context of the FIA’s bottom line, which was in the previous paragraph. I just answered, I think, the question of Mr Stone being a long-standing friend and a constituent. If I may say so, there seems to be a touch of cynicism in that, but he honestly didn’t-I’ve worked with Stone in the engineering works; I’ve worked with Stone when he was a master cutler; I’ve worked with Stone when he was chairman of the health authority on the three issues I’ve just talked about: rebuilding a children’s hospital, developing the medipark and looking at the wellness agenda. It was not a corrupt friendship; it was a positive friendship that I had, and I mean that very genuinely. Speak to Stone himself, and he will tell you. He is prepared to put that down in writing. I think that the reading of that relationship with a long-standing friend and a constituent has no bearing on the question of the declaration. I honestly do not understand.

In terms of the rest of that quote, I really do welcome it. I said that in my letter, and I genuinely say it to Mr Lyon. I thank Mr Lyon and his staff for the thorough job that they’ve done. Why do I say that? Because it cleared me of The Sunday Times allegations. That is why I was very pleased with what Mr Lyon said, which you, indeed, endorsed in your recommendations from his conclusions. I mean that genuinely.

Q8 Matthew Hancock: There was one thing that you said that I didn’t quite understand. Would you be able to expand on it? You mentioned the definition of public officials and who is and is not a public official. You said that public officials have power over legislation and, therefore, this place. My interpretation of public officials would be broader, in that people who have duties and power in the public sector are also public officials, aren’t they?

Mr Caborn: Mr Hancock, the commissioner, in this specific case, linked my statements. I said-and I believed this-that if we took the Sheffield project further, and it went from being a bit of an idea to a reality, we would have needed legislation. The commissioner then picked up that reference to legislation and said because I had used the word "legislation", that took things back to the meeting I had with Stone. He said that because I had deemed that we needed legislation, that, in his words-if I am correct in this-linked these things to Parliament. It took them from a constituency issue to a parliamentary issue. I don’t want to misquote Mr Lyon, but my understanding was that is where the link was.

In this specific case, I am saying that Stone has no locus at all on how this place operates and doesn’t have any influence at all on legislation. When you come back to that, and you’re reported as saying that you are concerned about the interpretation of the advocacy rules, I say that I interpreted the Guide to the Rules in relation to Crown servants, including Executive agencies. That is the interpretation that has been understood for some considerable time, and it has now been moved towards public officials. That is where the interpretation needs to be much clearer. What is a public official? Who is a public official? Is it a local authority chief executive? Does it go down to education authority chairs? Who is a public official now?

I took the definition of public officials in that context to mean those who have some influence on determining legislation and the way in which Parliament and Government are run. Drawing that line is not easy, but, in broad terms, it means Ministers, Crown officials and Executive agencies. That is what I took, genuinely, because that is what was in the guidelines, but as Mr Lyon said he went further than that and went on public officials. I don’t know what public officials means. I suppose it is your job now to sort that out.

Q9 Mr Heald: Looking at this, Richard, you are a paid adviser to the FIA. There was an interview with, of course, a bogus interviewer. You are saying that you spoke to your friend and chairman of the health authority, whom you have known for some years and who respects you-you are one of his constituency MPs, which he has to bear in mind. You put forward the proposition that you would like to do an experiment zoning the whole of Sheffield and using underutilised facilities-

Mr Caborn: Could I just correct that?

Mr Heald: I’ll finish the point. The effect of which is a win-win that will help both him and his interest in the people of Sheffield, and also the businesses concerned. Don’t you think that in those circumstances you should have said, "Well, actually, I’m paid by the FIA"?

Mr Caborn: I was asked to go to lunch, and he talked generally. He is the honorary consul of Finland in South Yorkshire, and following his experience in Finland, he came back and discussed the sport issue with me in particular. That is why he asked me to go to talk to him about whether I believed it was worth exploring the idea. It was his idea, not mine. The idea was born of his Finnish experience, but not so much here in the UK.

It was around the time of that lunch that he asked me what I thought. I told him, "There are a number of areas you could explore." He then asked me, "Should we go to set up some type of discussion with the vice-chancellors, industry and so on, and, if we do, will you chair it?" I hadn’t even got any terms of reference, but he subsequently sent me some terms of reference on the areas he thought to be the Finnish experience. That is the background. I had no idea about taking that forward, because there wasn’t a proposition on the table at that time. It was a general discussion such as you might have, Mr Heald, with the chairman or chief executive of your local authority or the chairman of your education authority. I never thought about that. Had it gone beyond an idea and had we set up a wellness council that had put a proposition that we needed to move the thing forward, I believed, as I said later, that we would need legislation to move that type of project forward. By that time-we are talking eight to 10 weeks before the general election-I had made it absolutely clear that I was standing down anyway, and it was because of that that Stone asked me whether I would chair this after I left the House of Commons.

Q10 Mr Heald: I was not on the panel last week-I was unwell-but what troubles me is that you give examples to the interviewer of the work that you’ve done in the past, you talk about the Olympics, and you go on to say that you have done this work advising the fitness industry. One example you give of your work for them is this. So if it is work for the fitness industry and you are talking to somebody who is paid by the public to look after the interests of the people of Sheffield and their health, surely you should tell him?

Mr Caborn: Well, the discussion with Stone was, I think, four weeks before the interview. On reflection on the meeting, he really asked me what the implication was, and how we could take it forward. I have only ever had one meeting with Stone on this. So I had a meeting with Stone, he fetched me in and I didn’t know what he was going to talk about. We discussed what I just told you, and I left that meeting. It wasn’t just about this; we did a bit of reminiscing, we had lunch and I went.

After that, I reflected on what he had been saying, about who, if that was the case, you would engage, and how you would approach that. All that was mulling around, and at that time I got entrapped by somebody trying to extract out of me what I am doing. Look, I had absolutely no intentions with these guys, because my intentions were on health and on engineering. People who understand my background will see where I am coming from. I have been an adviser to the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre, and I do quite a lot of work in the energy industry. That is what I am doing, and I said I was going to do that. But they wanted to know-this woman was lying through her back teeth to me all the time, trying to extract from me as much information as she can to put into The Sunday Times, to entrap me.

Okay, stupid I might be-stupid we all are if we put ourselves in that situation, and I have just said to these newer Members to be careful in future-but I was asked by a number of organisations, when I said I was packing up as Minister, what I was going to do. That is why I am president of the Amateur Boxing Association of England, president of the Youth Hostel Association, president of UK School Games and on the Football Foundation. I don’t get a penny for that, but I do a lot of work in that area. I could have been on loads more, but I didn’t. This wasn’t a job offer: this was exploring, through me, to write an article for The Sunday Times, to knock hell out of MPs. That’s what this was for.

I come back to this issue about what a public official is. I genuinely believe that public officials are those who can influence legislation in Parliament. If that is not the case, I think you ought to be saying that to many MPs, because I think my interpretation of Ministers, Crown officials and Executive agencies are what genuinely is the thought of most Back Benchers and people operating as Members of Parliament. I may be wrong on that, but that was my genuine interpretation.

Chair: Are you finished, Oliver? Paul, would you like to ask something?

Q11 Sir Paul Beresford: Just a short clarification. In an answer that you gave earlier you said that you had lunch with Mr Stone, who is chairman of a health trust, if I could correct that, not a health authority. At that lunch he offered you a job-he was going to offer you a job. The job potential was mentioned, and you felt it was inappropriate to mention the FIA unless it went further. Is that right?

Mr Caborn: What he said-it is at 01:16:38-was "David asked me to go and see…we had lunch a few weeks ago" and he had actually been down in Shropshire at that time and I just had lunch with him. I have had many meetings with Mr Stone over the years, and he raised a number of issues. He came from industry and I came from industry, and what we tried to do was to develop wealth creation through the intellectual property of health in one form or another for Sheffield. In that, this discussion was no different from any discussion that I had with Mr Stone, and the FIA honestly never came into my head.

Q12 Sir Paul Beresford: So what you are saying is that when the job was offered at the lunch you felt it would have been inappropriate if you had gone further?

Mr Caborn: First of all, I don’t think I would have taken the job, to be perfectly honest. This was a general discussion, "Richard, would you chair it? You’re packing up as an MP and you’ll have nothing to do; will you chair this?" That is what he said to me, which was a bit of a laugh and tongue in cheek. That is what he wanted me to do. It wasn’t a job where he said, "Here is a job description." He wasn’t interviewing me for a job; he was asking me whether I would be part of the team. If I was prepared to be part of the team, would I chair it? It was after all that discussion that I went away and reflected on it. I said, "Is this idea a goer?" I talked to a lot of people about it and said, "What do you think?" I talked to vice-chancellors and people like that. That is what we did. There wasn’t a job offer specifically put down. He just said to me, "If we set this up, would you chair it?"

Q13 Sir Paul Beresford: And you didn’t think you should say, by the way-

Mr Caborn: Sir Paul, I can honestly say it never crossed my mind.

Q14 Chair: Can I ask you about the post that you have with the FIA? It was a consultancy?

Mr Caborn: Yes.

Q15 Chair: Who did that prior to your appointment?

Mr Caborn: I can’t remember; I don’t know.

Q16 Chair: Were you appointed because you were an MP?

Mr Caborn: No, I was appointed, I think, because of my interest in the whole wellness agenda. My very first speech as a Sports Minister was on the National Audit Office’s report on tackling obesity. That was in 2001. Before that, obesity was not on the agenda. If you go back, you will find that it was the very first speech that I made as a Sports Minister. I always had a great interest in bringing the whole wellness agenda, sports agenda and physical activity agenda together. That is why, as a Minister for Sport for six years, I put this as a priority. It was after that that they came to me and said would I advise some of their members. You have to remember that the FIA is public sector, private sector and also the community. It is a not-for-profit organisation. It actually brings in the public sector. In fact, more than 50% are in the public sector-local authorities and trusts. The private sector is a minority of the FIA. I might be wrong about that; let’s call it a 50:50 break. It also has quite a lot of communities in that as well. It is more of a strategic body; it is not there to make profit. It is there to advise organisations in the public and private sector. That is why I took that to influence that agenda.

Q17 Chair: Do you hold that position with the FIA now?

Mr Caborn: I do hold that position with the FIA now, yes. The irony is that the whole wellness agenda brought in under the previous Administration is facing legislation changes that could split it from the health service. As I understand it, the chairman of the FIA is chairing the wellness council for the present Secretary of State for Health. The ideas that we were talking about in Sheffield may have resonance somewhere else.

Q18 Chair: Is it your contention that if that was being discussed at national level, you would have declared an interest?

Mr Caborn: Without a shadow of a doubt.

Q19 Chair: Has anybody got any further questions?

Thank you for coming along.

Mr Caborn: Can I thank you genuinely for giving me this opportunity to speak. Whatever your decision is, at least I have put on the record what I believe I did and why I did it. Thank you very much for that.