Standards in public life

An item in the current Private Eye magazine to the effect that the Official Receiver had appointed financial services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to act as special manager of the liquidation of the failed government contractor Carillion (of which the pensions consultant and auditor of subsidiaries was PricewaterhouseCoopers) rang a bell.

In 2012, the Eye managed to get a sight of a report prepared for Edward Heath into the collapse of Rolls Razor in 1964. The leading Board of Trade (an ancestor Department of BIS) inspector was Lord Benson, then joint senior partner at Coopers & Lybrand. Cork Gully, which was to become a subsidiary of Coopers, carried out detailed investigations. The report was not published and is embargoed until 2046 presumably because a number of those criticised in it were assumed to be alive and active until that date. (John Bloom, the force behind Rolls Razor, certainly still is both, as his rather laudatory entry in wikipedia shows.) Others criticised, according to the Eye, included financial advisers Price Waterhouse. Coopers & Lybrand under the rigorous Benson was clearly among the good guys. He retired in 1975 and died in 1995. In 1998 Price Waterhouse took over Coopers & Lybrand.

Incidentally, although Benson was a stout defender of institutions, he believed in evolutionary change. He also had a strong social conscience. The Independent's obituary says:

In 1976 he was appointed Chairman of the Royal Commission on Legal Services. It was an immense task, which Benson led with his formidable intellect, incisiveness, and energetic command.

The inquiry took almost three years. The outcome was a definitive study, meticulously researched and backed by statistics, of the services given by the legal profession; it swept aside all cobwebs and displayed a deep understanding of all aspects of the framework and practices of the law. He probed relentlessly, and expressed his conclusions with forceful moderation and pellucid clarity.

[...]

But in another respect the Report was highly radical. Organisation had never been the strength of the legal profession. Henry Benson was a superb administrator, and he produced a blueprint for the future. It included the recommendation for a Council of Legal Services, which he regarded as essential to keep practices under review and advise the Lord Chancellor. He saw this as "a necessary condition of considered action by both government and the profession". The Report suggested a mechanism for bringing law centres and citizens' advice bureaux into the mainstream of legal services and their funding. He urged one single, strong governing body for the Bar, rather than the fragmentation of responsibilities divided between the Bar Council and the Inns of Court. There were cogent proposals in every area: from equal opportunities to recondite conveyancing issues.

It would be idle to pretend that Benson was enthusiastic about the reception of the Royal Commission Report. The Government took years to respond, and did not grasp positively his recommendations. [saddest of all for Benson was] that the gap between the principle of equal access to the courts and the reality became ever greater over the next 15 years. At the heart of his Report was a belief that "part of the population suffers permanent and multiple deprivation" and that the first priority should be to ensure for them adequate legal services. He failed to detect from government a principled response to this fundamental issue. Not surprisingly, the draconian cuts in legal aid eligibility of 1993 were anathema to him.

And the situation has become worse since.