The Committee considered a nearly final draft of their report. A number of detailed changes had been suggested by Committee members which were tracked in the draft. In addition, the Committee had before it a large number of further proposed changes submitted by members in recent days before the meeting. The Committee considered these proposed changes in some detail and it was agreed that the subsequent agreed amendments should be made to the present draft.


The Committee considered papers which contained respectively the references, abbreviations and acronyms, and workshop report as appendices. A number of suggested alterations were made and agreed to be added.


The Chairman informed the Committee that the two dissenting members had redrafted a single paper as a possible dissenting statement. He had examined the paper using the criteria decided by the Committee at their last meeting, ie not of undue length, not misrepresenting the Committee's views, and not containing potential libels. His view was that the paper did not meet these criteria, particularly the last, as it contained unfavourable references to identifiable individuals. It also contained various possibly misleading comments on the Committee's procedures and findings. Help had again been offered to the dissenting members to redraft parts of the statement, but had again been refused.

Therefore the Chairman had sought the views of Committee members on the paper. A number of members had responded that they were opposed to the inclusion of the proposed dissenting statement. Some members were concerned about possible legal responsibilities of the Committee in publishing a dissenting statement, even if it were prefaced by a disclaimer stating that it did not represent the views of most members of the Committee. Other members stated they had professional responsibilities not to publish statements they knew to be incorrect.

In order to answer legal questions raised by Committee members, the Chairman had approached departmental observers and ascertained that the Committee would be considered as publishers of all material contained in their report. In addition, the Committee would be held legally responsible for all its contents regardless of any disclaimers to the contrary. At that late stage, the Chairman had authorised further negotiations which resulted in a further redraft of a dissenting statement being sent to members. However a number of members pointed to specific factual inaccuracies still remaining in the latest version. The two dissenting members disagreed that their statement contained any misrepresentations of fact. They stated that they would not redraft the dissenting statement any further: the Committee had to accept their latest version or nothing at all. They added that if the Committee would not allow the dissenting statement in its latest form, they would not sign up to the main report.

The Committee then voted in favour of a motion rejecting the various versions of the dissenting statement on the grounds that they failed to identify the reasons for their disagreement with the Committee's Report.

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