I'm going to go through the video again and make a more considered analysis of what was said. This first post relates to the initial exchanges between the committee chairman, Andrew Miller, and Edward Acton.
Miller asks Acton about the terms of reference for Lord Oxburgh's report and asks if these were changed. He notes that the old committee were told that Oxburgh would assess the science ("an external appraisal of the science itself") but that Oxburgh subsequently said this was not the case, citing the UEA press release of 22 March ("an independent assessment of CRU’s key publications"). The question rather seems to miss the point, since neither UEA's evidence or the press release make it clear that the committee was only looking for evidence of deliberate wrongdoing.
Acton's reply is that the terms were not changed and that the purpose was to "assess the science and see if there was anything wrong" - words he used in the original hearings. This phrase could mean anything. He then quotes the original S&TC report, which asked the Oxburgh panel to determine if the work of CRU had been "soundly built" and says that this is what he meant - "was it scientifically justified". He goes on to say that Oxburgh notes that the unit's work was indeed "scientifically justified".
It should be noted, however, that the line from the report Acton quotes concludes a paragraph discussing the need for the unit's work to be based on "a solid foundation of excellent, peer reviewed science", so I think it's fair to say that the committee were talking about the quality of the science. As we know, the Oxburgh panel only looked for evidence of deliberate wrongdoing and didn't assess the quality of the science.
However, instead of addressing the discrepancy between what Oxburgh actually did (look for evidence of deliberate wrongdoing) and what UEA told the committee (assess the science and see if there was anything wrong) he obfuscates, by introducing the idea that some people might have thought that Oxburgh was going to assess the whole of climatology, and then launches into a preprepared spiel on the EPA report and an NAS report.
So at the end of the first exchange, we have no explanation of why there was no assessment of the quality of CRU's science.
(Readers have noted that the EPA concluded that CRU's input to climate science was sound because Oxburgh had exonerated them. It would be good to get confirmation of this, because we would then clearly have a circular argument).