Yes, a blind trust is one of the tools that we use, particularly in relation to ministers who have significant private interests and then go into a ministerial job and need to have some degree of separation from their private financial interests.
The mechanism that we use primarily in relation to ministers and public servants going on into private commercial roles.... There is a body that has just had its responsibilities transferred to our new ethics commission; that body, which will be familiar to some of you, is called ACOBA, the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments. One of the things it does is look at the appointment, and it very often imposes an advisory period of, say, a year or six months—sometimes I think it can be as long as three years—during which the former minister or the former official is advised not to engage in, for example, lobbying their immediately previous colleagues.
You ask how effective that is. Again, I think it's sensible to have these of rules of thumb, but they can only ever be rules of thumb aimed at the fundamental principle. The fundamental principle here is that you do not deploy your previous status in government—as a minister or as an official—as a private asset. You don't do that, whether it's three months later, six months later or six years later.