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One of the surest ways of delaying progress is to appoint a committee to answer the wrong questions. Any attempt to ask the right questions will then, for several years, be frustrated because Ministers will look silly if they start another investigation so soon. Lack of progress is even more assured if the original committee consists entirely of interested parties (so that its conclusions can be dismissed as biased in their favour) or alternatively contains no one with expert knowledge of the field under review (so that the conclusions can be dismissed as amateurish). The Secretary of State, in appointing the Dainton Committee, included no professional librarian or information scientist. However, the effect of this is offset by the fact that he set them a question to which the answer is, by general consent, obvious: