Whitehall Loop

The process by which a government department or Agency sets the rules, makes the choices, and adjudicates on an appeal is well described by Tim Slessor in his book “Ministries of Deception” which reviews such well known cases the sinking of the Belgrano, Gulf War Syndrome, and the crash of the Chinook helicopter on the Mull of Kintyre. He calls it the Whitehall Loop. He defines it in this way

“At its simplest, this is the closed circuit procedure where, in reply to questions asked of a government department or minister, the answers are put together by the same civil servants whose earlier judgement is both the subject and the cause of the inquiry in the first place. It is an arrangement in which, in too many controversies, the inhabitants of Whitehall decide the rules and which cards they will allow into play. They decide what is relevant. And what is not. They advise the minister accordingly. Too frequently they seem not to be accountable for these decisions to anyone but themselves”

The Whitehall Loop has bedevilled environmental issues, and continues to do so.

It was claimed that the site selection process was scientific, but the reality was that the English Nature teams made a subjective judgement, then used selected monitoring data (e.g. bird counts) to show that their selection was ‘reasonable’. No attempt was made either to assess the relative importance of each site, or the risks to which it was exposed. When ABP suggested just such a classification it was dismissed as irrelevant by English Nature.