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Commission, Commission, Commission First up, we called the Competition Commission and asked them for their publicly available register. They said that although they had the strictest background checks when dealing with potential conflicts of interest they were "in the process of putting one together" But surely, we thought, of all the public bodies the Competition Commission which deals with monopolies and mergers should be the body to follow the guidelines and have a publicly available register? The Council for Science and Technology which is chaired by the Trade and Industry Secretary, Patricia Hewitt MP, didn't do much better with a very interesting ommission. Euan Baird hadn’t declared Scottish Power and his Companies House entry was misleading it somehow gave the impression that he was Chairman and CEO of Scottish Power rather than a non-executive director. When Mark called, he said that he had now registered it and what was Companies House? The place where by law you have to personally register any directorships you hold. We called the Medical Research Council. Four times. Eventually they sent us over an email which looked like it had been cobbled together. It was not a comprehensive list of members’ interests. So Mark gave them a call. They immediately sent us the ‘register’ – the forms the members had originally filled in. This is not a publicly available register we said. Oh yes it is, they said. Refusing to turn this more into a panto farce than it currently was we decided to cross reference that too but there were still several omissions. 
Fortunately their Executive Director Nicholas Winterton was sent down to meet us and clear up the confusion. Could he answer why these companies were not registered and why they weren’t a potential conflict of interest? Yes, was the happy answer. Unfortunately when Mark asked him what each of the missing companies did, he didn’t know any of them... But, we said, the Chairman of your governing board, Sir Anthony Cleaver, is on the Committee for Standards in Public Life - the body responsible for ethical probity. Does he not know about the guidelines? Is he not responsible for the entire committee’s register as well as his own entry? Mark called him to check. He put the phone down.
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