Tēnā tātou, nau mai whakatau mai ki te kaupapa o te rā. Kia ora, my name is Jackie and today we'll be hearing from Allen and Clarke team members talking about enquiries and reviews and with particular emphasis on the 2018 Enquiry into Mental Health and Addiction. Thank you for submitting your questions over the last couple of weeks and we'll be speaking to those today.
And any other additional pātai or queries that you may have that may come through today, we'll talk about those two at the end if we have time. So let's get started and first of all, let's introduce our team. Kia ora, ko Jason Carpenter tōku ingoa.
I'm a senior consultant here at Allen and Clarke. I've been involved in a number of rapid reviews and was one of the policy leads on the Government Enquiry into Mental Health and Addiction. Kia ora koutou, I'm Kelly Reeve and I was the Head of Secretariat or the Executive Director for four Government Enquiries and I supported the Royal Commission into the terrorist attacks.
Kia ora, I'm Jan. I've worked on five different enquiries and I was the Senior Administrator on the Enquiry into Mental Health and Addiction. Kia ora, I'm called Matthew Allen at home, Managing Partner here for New Zealand Office of Allen and Clarke.
I was Programme Manager for the Enquiry into Mental Health and Addiction and have led or participated in quite a number of short reviews around the motu. Ka pai, tēnā tātou katoa. Well obviously a team of great depth and experience so we're going to be interested to hear your kōrero today.
Let's start with our first question. What is the difference between a Royal Commission, an enquiry and a review? Kelly? I'll start with rapid reviews or reviews. They can be commissioned by any agency and they're often done with an independent eye to understand a problem or an issue or an event that's happened.
So not dissimilar to the Government Enquiries or the Royal Commission but of a different magnitude. We've included them in today because they follow or tend to follow some very similar processes as this. Royal Commissions, they're the highest type of enquiry that the Government could institute and they are commissioned by the Governor General and generally they're reporting back to Parliament.
They're for most significant events that might happen in New Zealand such as the terrorist attack or in this case more recently we've got the Abuse in Care Royal Commission. Government Enquiries and known also as Ministerial Enquiries, they are also for significant events but a slightly perhaps a different perspective. They can look at system matters, failures, issues of contention at any point.
They have a specific terms of reference which we'll talk about more and they are commissioned through the Enquiries Act. So that's the fundamental kind of authoritative act that enables them to commission evidence, summons witnesses, some press evidence if that's required and determine how they're going to gather that evidence. So when it comes to setting up an enquiry, what are the most important elements you need to think about? So I'll take that one.
So I think there's a few. I think primarily obviously the first thing you do when you're establishing an enquiry is you tend to develop terms of reference. And I guess what I would say about that is that however they're crafted is going to set the direction for the entire enquiry.
So it's crucial they get to the nub of what's required, not too broad if you can avoid it, not too narrow, it's a fine line to walk. It's enough to give a panel a mandate to enquire, I guess to take a track that they feel comfortable doing within the parameters of what they're given. So it needs to be broad enough for that.
The other part I would say is that the panel itself, often these enquiries are established through the Department of Internal Affairs. Other departments can do it, but Internal Affairs usually or very often provides support for it. So DIA would work with a minister or whomever to identify potential candidates for a panel.
So the composition of the panel will be the second thing. It's crucial that that panel be made up of people who have the right expertise, background to apply to it. It could be legal, it could be technical, it's a technical nature.
It's likely to require people who can engage well. These often enquiries, for example the enquiry into mental health and addiction, was very much focused on getting out, talking to people, hearing the voices of people. So in our case we had a very well-rounded panel.
I'm not just saying that, they were very well-rounded, very cohesive, and a really good capability to engage with people. And then I'd say setting the panel up for success is probably the other thing. In the case of the enquiry into mental health and addiction, Ron Patterson, who was the chair, brought the panel together.
Kelly and I were there as well at the outset as Secretary-at-Lead and Programme Manager. And we worked through and agreed how we're going to apply to this reference, what values we're going to apply to the enquiry, and how the panel members work with each other, how we would work to the panel to make sure that their mandate was reached, I guess. So it's about forging a really good, strong team, and that needs to be done right at the outset.
And the last thing I'd say is setting up with the Secretary early. Like I say, for that enquiry, Kelly and I were up for the first couple of weeks. An inbox was set up right away as soon as the enquiry was announced.
It started getting flooded with people wanting to express their views and their personal stories. The workload took off exponentially within a couple of days. And so you need to move quickly to establish a really good team to support the panel.
Who do you think to add there, Jason? I think it's just around the questions that the enquiry and the terms of reference set up to answer. They drive everything else. So what those questions are, how broad they are, how deep do you need to go to answer them, they become the thing that the panel exists to answer and the whole Secretariat in support.
So they're really fundamental to the whole operation of everything. The Secretariat's obviously a key part, as you've mentioned. So what does that involve in terms of setting that up to support the enquiries? Yeah, I'd say it's crucial to get the right people in at the right time.
So you've got a Head of Secretariat or Executive Director. You've got a Programme Manager that Matt spoke to. Also there's loads of other roles depending on the size.
The team could be anywhere from two people to 200 for a Royal Commission. So you've got Communications, Stakeholder Engagement. We've got Cultural Advisors, Information Managers, Analysts, Technical Experts.
The whole range depending on the specific enquiry you're talking about. I think when we think about the qualities of the team members as well, enquiries typically, especially record reviews, work at a lightning pace. The establishment is just really frenetic.
There's a lot going on. The team members need to be really flexible and understand. It's given a really frenetic pace in the beginning and the team really settles down.
But especially in the beginning, it can be a bit crazy. Recruitment for the team is really crucial. And it takes a lot of time to get a team up and going.
So bringing in the right people at the right time is really, really key I think. Is there anything else? No, I think you've covered it off. There's something about the speed and the pace of it that the right people will be able to feel comfortable working at that pace.
And understand that sometimes there's a synthesis of ideas, ways and approaches. And it's very much a team. So working alongside your policy expertise with your economist, with your evaluator, they have different strengths and skills and they need to be able to work together towards that common goal, the vision that the inquirers have set down.
I think in terms of the difference with other things is that you're working to the panel, like you exist to serve the panel. And so it is slightly different to some other jobs where you have a little bit more autonomy or whatever. You exist to get the information that they need.
So it's a slightly different perspective than other roles sometimes. The only other thing I would add is that a mixed model quite often works. Often for an inquirer you would second staff in government departments, etc.
You might also contract in particular expertise for surge capacity, etc. So there is a degree of value in having that mixed model of not just... I think if you start off thinking you're going to get everybody from government departments, you're going to have quite a long lead in. If you want to have a ground running, then quite often you're going to need to move to get some expertise in really quickly.
And that could be academic, it could be contractors, it could be, I don't know, whatever you need, basically. And I think that's the key to a good secretariat, is move at pace. Yeah, and I'm just noting for the Mental Health Enquiry, 5,200 submissions, 400 meetings, 26 community forums.
That is a lot of people that you need in order to make all of that move and work. So you will need to look elsewhere maybe than just in one or two places. And that's in nine months.
So you've got to set it up, get the people on board. Do your due diligence around getting information, which Jason will talk to in a minute. Engage, assess, summarise, deliberate, write a report, publish a report.
It's a tough gig. One of the things that I think you might talk to Jason is that the terms of reference does specify when the panel or the inquirers can start gathering evidence. And usually that's a very short time from the point that it's announced.
So that puts the pressure on, as Jim was saying, to be able to get the team ready to be able to start gathering evidence early on. And inquirers expect to be able to do that as quickly as possible. Yeah, that's a good sort of segue, I guess, into our next question in terms of you've got as many people, I guess, as you think in place.
There's relative, you know, complex, important, detailed information issues that you're sort of dealing with. So what are the best approaches you use to cover that? And in terms of deciding what sort of evidence and information you need to respond to that terms of reference, knowing you're also on a tight time frame. It's all in the planning and the programme management element of it.
I'll start with working, I work backwards from the end point that the terms of reference says the report must be delivered. And as we've both mentioned now, they do follow similar phases, that establishment phase, the evidence gathering research phase, the deliberations and sense making, trying to understand what you've heard. And then developing the findings and recommendations and presenting that to government.
So I work from that end point backwards and work with the programme manager and the panel to allocate time for the certain activities. And I think that that sets them up for success because they are working and understand what the plan is. And we are there to operationalise that plan, if you like, and deliver on it and support them to do so.
I think just in terms of the types of evidence that you collect and how much time and effort you put on each different sort of potential area, it's all driven by the terms of reference and the questions that you're answering. So if you've got a sort of more investigative set of questions around trying to find fact or you're trying to find a causal link between two events, you probably have a more narrow view of like I'm going to do interviews, I'm going to require documents to be provided, I'm going to review, I'm going to look for facts and for things that I can say this went wrong or this should have been done better. And the difference between that and a more systemic sort of look at the government acquiring to mental health and addiction, how should mental health and addictions be managed in New Zealand, it's a completely different kettle of fish with very different evidence needs.
And so the broader ones may include things like commissioned research into academic literature, best practise evaluations and reviews of current initiatives, international jurisdiction scans, going overseas in many cases to actually look at how other countries have done it. It all depends on what you need, what the questions are, how much time you have and looking at how you're going to have the information to answer the questions in the terms of reference and make a recommendation or a finding about that. So just being really clear, you are the commission, you have to answer the question, what information do I need to answer that question and then go in and find it.
Speaking to the people with the lived experience, I think it's really crucial in that one as well. As Jackie mentioned, the government acquiring to mental health and addiction, there was a massive emphasis on hearing the voice of the people. And so the panel interpreted that to be a main focus of their activities, but also of how the secretariat was set up as well.
So they spent a huge amount of time travelling the country going to meetings, I think over 400 meetings with experts, delivery partners like everyone. Public consultation, over 5,000 submissions, including video submissions, Facebook, whatever made sense to people, NZ Sign Language videos. So they took a very, we want to hear the voice of the people and to do it well, we're going to put a huge amount of our time but also secretariat time into doing that.
And that's what leads to that sort of outcome is that commitment of effort and prioritisation. And then still have to balance that with other forms of evidence as well, the best practise and all that other stuff. But it becomes a really important part of the picture for your deliberations.
So it sounds like the mental health enquiry, as an example, was very broad in terms of who they were wanting to talk to and hear from. What about as you get, and perhaps it's with other examples, you get deep into the details, what steps can you take to make sure that the enquiry team are unbiased and there's no sort of group thing, group kind of thing going on in terms of the information you're getting and how that's going to end up being put back out to the public? Yeah, I think, again, it was a couple of facts. I think, firstly, the panel, hopefully, will be diverse or have a diverse range of views.
They won't necessarily all be from that area. That's quite often the case. You might quite often have a senior ex-public official or a lawyer or whomever quite often lead and they're there to apply some discipline in terms of enquiry process.
And so it might not necessarily come from that background. So they come, I guess, as a clean piece of paper, whatever the statement is. So I think the breadth of the panel is important.
I think also it's about who you bring on to the team. So we mentioned before that you want diversity, but you also want people who fit the purpose, I guess, to be frank. There is an academic dimension to the work, no doubt, but you don't want people who are going to apply a very academic, long-term, overly systematised approach to it, like an evaluation, for example.
You want people who are leaving the advocacy hat behind. We talked in our enquiry about being in service to the panel, and that's exactly what you are. Your voice, your view, to some extent, needs to be subordinated to the view of the panel.
So you can provide the evidence from the background you have, but it needs to be carefully presented. And I think in terms of the evidence gathering that Jason touched on, and I said before, it needs to be deep enough and broad enough that you give yourself enough, actually not too much, that you don't get bogged down in the detail. And I think if you're able to lift yourself up occasionally and think, okay, what does the enquiry panel really need to deliver what they want to deliver, then hopefully you're going to be more guided by that than you are by your own desire to get down into the detail and really learn something or to really nut out issues.
So I think that helps. And then, which I probably should have led with, more of a sort of programmatic approach to it. For enquiries and reviews that I've been involved in, we have very much set the tone right from the beginning by saying, okay, this is our sampling frame, if you like.
These are the people we're going to go to. This is the information we're specifically going to seek to this level. There's always a temptation just to go to government departments, for example, if you're running an enquiry, and say, give us everything you have, tell us everything you know, and then you're just overwhelmed.
So I think, yeah, to really think through at the beginning exactly what the terms of reference say, exactly the questions that you need to ask, and therefore what information do we really need. And to keep that filter on about, to recognise that people are coming with all different perspectives. You don't want to be captured by those.
You don't want to overly weight certain views, even if they might have worked in that sector for 50 years. Often we're looking for new solutions to long-term problems. So you want to hear from people who are new to it.
You want to hear from innovative thinkers. So I think it's a course you need to be telling yourself that all the time and reminding each other of that, I think. And the deliberations will be the last thing I mention.
Often a thing that is left too late to do well. You gather evidence, you're presenting that to a panel, you're doing the discussions, and you're really needing time to deliberate so that the panel has time to rethink it through all the implications and what that means. What that might mean in terms of recommendations and implementation.
So giving enough time for that, which also enables that challenging of groupthink. Real hearty discussions and challenging of each other around the table. There's some sort of process thing built into it as well.
If you're doing interviews, having natural justice, make sure that they have the ability to respond to what you're going to write or check notes. Just make sure as you're going through that you haven't misinterpreted. You're just having systems and processes to make sure that you are actually getting the points of view and not automatically putting your own lens across it.
There's things like that you can do all the way through. When it comes to that point of recommendations being developed and considered, what sort of recommendations have the best chance of being implemented in your experience? That's been unambiguous but not too specific. It's probably a little bit late for us walking that line.
Focus on the underlying drivers for change and make recommendations because your report is going to be a snapshot in time and the context around it will change really quickly. And you won't be there to be able to argue about what's in it. It just has to stand alone.
You have to use your recommendations to point to the future that you want and then leave the how to the officials and to the government to respond to it. But trying to make the recommendations context agnostic. For example, if you referred to DHBs in the Mental Health and Addiction Enquiry, they no longer exist.
If that was one of your key recommendations, that now can be dismissed to a certain extent because now the context changed so much that it's no longer relevant. So you want your report and your recommendations to be able to last into the future. So being really clear about what change you're actually looking for without needing to really specify the context.
You don't need to specify timelines. Things may change, budgets may change, COVID may happen. That means that your timelines become a reason to ignore the recommendation because we couldn't possibly hit it because of whatever.
So therefore we can dismiss it. And similarly, having fewer recommendations, if they're the right ones, can be a lot more powerful. If it's 50 and the government says, we accepted 45 out of 50, look how great we did.
And those five may be the ones that you were like, oh, I really, really needed those five. Whereas if you have five or 10, there's nowhere to hide. You have to respond to each of them and at least they're all really front and centre.
You can't tuck anything in behind. So fewer number, make them unambiguous, leave the context but really focus on the change. Anything else anyone wants to add on that? No, I mean, I think quite often in terms of recommendation, it is a temptation to say recommendations to indicate who might be responsible for what.
And that's part of it, keeping it future-proofed as institutions change as well. So sometimes it's better to let them stay in line. This needs to happen within these parameters.
How it actually rolls out can be sorted out later, I guess. You don't want to be saying this agency must do this because it might not exist. And you can, you don't have to make a recommendation for every finding.
So you can leave your findings as findings. I mean, just the power of you being an independent panel that makes a finding that something wasn't up to scratch or something was wrong. That can be enough to drive the change that you needed without necessarily needing that specific recommendation to follow on.
So you can just leave things as findings, especially if they've been mapped on to the few number of really sort of transformational recommendations. You can get your points across without needing to have 50 recommendations or whatever the right number is for what you're trying to achieve. While you're just thinking about sort of what, for each of you individually, what your key kind of takeaways would be for people around enquiries, just a couple of other quick questions that have come through.
Why are enquiries so expensive? I don't know that they are. I don't even know if they are. Yeah, exactly.
I mean, I think they can be expensive if it's a long term enquiry, enquiring into decades and decades of activity involving a lot of engagement with people. Yeah, they can cost. I guess it's more a question of return on investment.
An enquiry can really delve to the nub of an issue and really suggest massive improvements for the future. So from a public good perspective, they can be very good. So I don't know that they're so expensive.
The Enquiry into Mental Health and Addiction had a budget of six and a half million. I think Kelly brought it in well under that. We had 25 staff, we had a panel to look after, massive amounts of travel.
If you're going to get out and engage with people particularly, or if you're going to run interviews, as some enquiries have more of an inquisitorial approach, it can be one on one interviews with transcription and everything like that. The cost really mounts up. And even actually just making the enquiry report available, accessible, can be very costly.
Again, using our case example as an example. We produced a report, we produced a couple of evidence based reviews of what people had to say. There were a couple of commissioned reports.
We translated at least the summary into Te Reo and various other languages. We had an easy read version. A two minute, five minute video, cartoon video.
Sign language. So all these things, they take time and they cost. And if you want to do it well, you need to invest.
And I think that's an important point and in fact one of the ones about who the audience is. So the commissioning body is the Parliament or the Governor General, but the audience tends to be the public because that's who's seeking or wanting assurance that the system, if there were gaps or failures in the system, that it's been addressed. And so going to that again about why you would go to those efforts to translate or make available an easy read version or so forth, that's the investment.
You're honouring that undertaking and responding to the public. And the scope and scale of the questions that you're answering are going to drive that size as well. So if you're the Royal Commission into Abuse and State Care, the number of people that you're going to be dealing with just means that you're going to have a bigger apparatus to be able to respond to.
So it will be more expensive, you'll create more information which then needs to be managed, which then needs to be analysed, which then needs to feed through into the processes. So that the size and scale of your commission or enquiry will be commensurate to the questions that you're trying to answer and how much evidence and information and hearings that you need to answer that. And actually an illustration of that, in terms of the amount of information or data or evidence, we were reading that the Abuse and Care Royal Commission has accumulated over one million pages of material and documentation.
And all of that needs to be read, understood and analysed as you said. So that is a significant undertaking and explains some cost. But necessary if you want to hear the voices of the people that have been through.
So it's like the cost is linked to what you've set out to do. Yeah and I think that's the important part is when people ask about cost and money that when they understand, when they can see, well here's the report, I can read it, here's the report, I can see a summary of it in whatever language, in sign language, it brings meaning to everybody asking about it. Okay well time must certainly fly when you're having fun because we don't have too much more time available.
But enough for you all to give us your key lessons that you've learned from working on enquiries. I think mine would be, it was said a number of times, is that the terms of reference really drive the methodology. So the terms of reference will set up the questions you're answering, the timeframes, how long you have to actually respond.
And so your methodology will always flex to fit that terms of reference to make sure that you answer the questions. And we talk about the nine months for the government enquiry into mental health and addiction, but that includes all of the establishment and getting the panel up to speed. So your actual operational time before the report is sent off is short, so you're going to have to prioritise different ways of getting information and synthesis and doing everything you can to deliver the report in the time.
And I think the enquiry panel, they are the ones that are making the decisions, so they can't just kick things for touch, they have to make the finding, make the recommendation, they are the one that's been appointed. So just making sure you get everything to the best possible extent you can in that timeframe, but there will always be time for more. There's always a drive to get more, but you may not have time just because of the terms of reference.
That's right. I think my one is reflecting a little bit on what we touched on before about that deliberations process. In other language, it's sense making or thinking time where there's discussion and weighing up of that evidence.
And that time is often squeezed really hard by the desire to gather more and more evidence, to be certain of facts, to be certain of probabilities. There is a desire to be right and to get it right and to weigh it all up. So that evidence gathering can continue and squeeze that really precious time for deliberations.
So I would say if I was leading an enquiry, it's to protect that with everything you can, because that's where it makes sense and makes meaning. And part of that deliberation, if you're going to deliberate on something and you're going to make some findings, you also need to think about natural justice. Because if you're making findings about some agency may or may not have acted appropriately, then you need to check that.
You need to provide the right context and you need to double check that. And that does mean quite often giving the agency the ability to respond to that draft finding, because it wouldn't be fair just to put it out there and then subsequently find out there's actually some context as to the reason why that wasn't the case. So that deliberation period provides for some of that thinking as well.
Any other key lessons for you, Matt? For me, there's a number. I think we've touched on many of them. But I think the one I would go with would be getting people in soon and the right people.
And I talked a little bit about it, not being advocates, frankly, not being too overly academic, really be able to move at pace, flexibility. I think being in service, you know, if you're a public agency or you're coming in as a consultant or you work in academia, you still have, I guess, a public service ethos or maybe even a background. And I think it's really important to emphasise that we are, we are, you are, who is involved, is in service to the panel.
You're not the panel. Your view, while you may want to share it, isn't necessarily what's going to be put forward. So you need to put yourself in the bag, basically.
Gin? Yeah, I would say, kind of touching on what Matt said, just for the secretariat to remember that they are there to support the panel. The work, especially on the enquiry into mental health and addiction, they're hearing from the community and lived experience. It's exhausting.
There's a lot of travel involved. They need a lot of time to deliberate and analyse the information they've heard and to consider what recommendations they're going to put forward. So just as a secretariat member to support them as best as you can, really.
Just keep that in your back and your mind. OK, we've got a question come through in the chat. Thank you.
Enquiries seem to be initiated when something bad has happened. But are there other situations when enquiries could usefully be set up? Yeah, so I think, I mean, it's still perhaps being seen as something bad has happened. But the one that's been recently announced is looking at what was learned from that experience to apply through to the future in terms of COVID.
So there's a perspective, you know, there's various perspectives of how well New Zealand responded to that. But this enquiry is actually forward thinking in terms of the next occasion that we may have where we're under such threat from whether it's disease or other activities. So it's a forward thinking enquiry looking at what systems or processes we could put in place as opposed to driven out of a failure.
And I mean, potentially, while there was issues around the mental health and addiction, while there were obvious and deep ones, it was also a forward thinking, what can we do to change and transform and respond? Yeah, very much, that's a heavy focus, transformational, generational. And I think some of these systemic issues can't be dealt with in a few years. And that's, I think, well, actually, that'd be the other lesson I learned from it.
You know, I think you need to position your report to make it quite clear that you are, if you are dealing with systemic long term issues, it is going to take some time so that those recommendations are not a blueprint that needs to come next. We may have time for one more from the chat. How do you deal with an enquiry environment where the policy background is continuously changing, making it challenging to keep the facts about the current state? That's a good question.
I'd say that one of the ones, like the very earliest one that I was involved in, involved multiple, it was a whey protein and a botulism scare, and it involved multiple people, individuals and agencies. And so one of the things that the enquiry did was constitute a timeline and included all the various elements that you could see where changes had been made. So you would track all the policies and when policy changes were made and what the implications might have been across governance, population, whatever those might be, those variables and features.
So there's ways of, I mean, I think it's really important to make sure that you're acknowledging that and very much in a fast movement, moving environment. And if those changes are happening while the enquiry is underway, that introduces a whole other different level of complexity. So the ability to pivot.
So you have a, obviously you're going to design a research or an analytical frame to manage all the information you're gathering and that may need to shift quite quickly if in fact you find there's another element to that issue that has suddenly come to light, you know, you may need to pivot. Well, thank you all very much. It's been very interesting.
Tēnā tātou, kua pau te wai ā tātou. Thank you for joining our kōrero today and we will send a follow up email to you with any answers that maybe we couldn't get to. But if you'd like to talk more with ANC about how we can support you in your mahi, then please let us know.
