The Skeleton in the Planning Cupboard: some very interesting facts

In the episode of "Yes Minister", "The Skeleton in the Cupboard", at a meeting with his staff Hacker is asked to discipline South Derbyshire Local Authority for inefficiency. It seems that they are not submitting their statistics to the Department. Hacker is reluctant because the Authority is run by his party, and gets the impression that Dr Cartwright has additional information that Sir Humphrey does not want disclosed. He decides to go to Cartwright's office to discuss the matter with him.
When Sir Humphrey learns from Bernard that the minister has "gone walkabout" he is enraged and heads off in pursuit. He bursts in on Hacker and Cartwright just after Cartwright has revealed that South Derbyshire is in fact the most efficient Local Authority in Britain and, while they do not submit statistics to the Department, they keep their own records perfectly well

Hacker:I have learned some very interesting facts.
Sir Humphrey:Well I sincerely hope it does not happen again.

Now according to the JEP, "The decision to approve an adventure centre at Les Ormes - which opens this weekend - will be the subject of an official report by a UK investigator."

The same article reports that "Senator Cohen said that he made the best decision he could make on the advice that he was given."

and adds:

"Senator Cohen has also stressed that he did not see environment officer advice about the impact on Creepy Valley, or know about the £35,000 tourism grant that Les Ormes received for the project."

All one can say after reading this is that he should get out and about more. Either he is not getting the information which he should have about the environmental impact - which means his officers are not doing their job properly - or it is never getting to him, which also means they are not doing their job properly. If he contacted a few environmental groups, and go on a site visit with them, he might actually learn something about the environment. Does he just sit and wait for information to come to him? Perhaps, like Jim Hacker, he needs to go "walkabout" and might learn some interesting facts if he did. Unfortunately like Jim Hacker, for the most part he just seems to depend "on the advice that he was given".

And while he states that he did not know about the tourism grant, it is notable that he omits to say whether any of his planning officers knew about the grant, and had, perhaps, also liased with tourism. Did the tourism department contact planning, is the question that should be asked? If he goes on advice given, could that advice have been slanted because the officers in question knew about the tourism grant, but - because it was not a planning matter - saw no reason to mention it when "advice was given".