Propriety is concerned with meeting high standards of public conduct and parliamentary expectations, and cannot be dispensed with even when making difficult judgements on competing issues in an emergency.46 Responding in these situations often requires rapid decision-making by officials and ministers, based on imperfect information and a set of unattractive options.47 We heard how quickly departments have to weigh up different options and make decisions in a crisis situation. For example, when the government was notified of the imminent failure of Flybe in 2020, UKGI told us that advisors spent four days in the company and assessed that intervention “would not be a good use of government money because, if we put a penny in at the top, we might not be able to work out where that penny would go and it might not be focused on what we needed it to”.48 More recently, when the issues surrounding Silicon Valley Bank arose, a number of teams were stood up over the course of a weekend to come up with a rapid set of different contingency plans.49