Let’s end the public inquiry racket – they are only enriching lawyers
We are awash with public inquiries. At present there are 18 up and running, ranging from the mother and father of them all into the Covid pandemic to those whose provenance is almost lost in the mists of time. Can anyone remember why there is an inquiry into undercover policing? It was set up by Theresa May in 2015 and is only now taking evidence for its Phase 2 hearings due to run until December.
When it will report is anyone’s guess. The next phase, according to the inquiry website, is to examine “current undercover policing practices and recommendations for how undercover policing should be conducted in future.” This is the ninth year of the inquiry yet that seems to be something that should have been covered in the first week.
What is more bizarre is that a review of undercover policing tactics 10 years ago found “appalling practices” so we know that already. Lady May, when Home Secretary, should have done something to improve matters, not bat them away to an inquiry. So far this has cost £88 million, of which £37 million has gone on legal costs. Nice work if you can get it.
We have too many inquiries, they are too costly, they last too long and they often tell us little we did not know already. The Grenfell Tower inquiry took seven years to establish what was known within a few weeks of the tragedy. The report, amounting to more than a million words in seven volumes, said the conflagration was caused by the “systematic dishonesty” of construction companies that manufactured cladding for the tower block’s refurbishment.
Their mendacity was compounded by “decades of failure” by government ministers and officials who ignored a series of warnings over the risks. This should have been the subject of a police investigation in 2016 with a view to bringing prosecutions but the statutory inquiry took precedence. Now Scotland Yard says it will take another 18 months at least to sift through the evidence.
We are still awaiting reports on, inter alia, Scottish child abuse, Muckamore Abbey Hospital in Northern Ireland, the Omagh bombing in 1998, the murder of Jalal Uddin, an imam, in Rochdale eight years ago and the activities of a brain surgeon Sam Eljamel at a hospital on Tayside.
Two more have just started, one into the Lucy Letby case even though she is behind bars and another into the murder 35 years ago of the Northern Ireland lawyer Pat Finucane. It has already been conceded that there was state collusion in his death and David Cameroin as Prime Minister apologised to the family in 2012. Will this tell us anything we don’t know?
For people affected by these events a judicial inquiry offers some sort of catharsis but they are not necessarily of benefit to the country as a whole. It is apparent that many are substitutes for proper criminal investigations which only follow when they are over, if they ever do.
Judge-led public inquiries used to be rare. Between 1960 and 1990 there were just 30. They have grown like Topsy since the 2005 Inquiries Act with close to 100 over the past 30 years. The total cost must be well north of £1 billion, probably a lot more.
A House of Lords committee has just produced a report into this burgeoning industry and has called for a complete overhaul of the way statutory inquiries are conducted. It recommended a fixed timescale to avoid unnecessary and excessive costs and more to be led by a panel of experts rather than a judge. Judicial inquiries are adversarial and tend to become a blame game rather than a means of finding out what went wrong and how to fix it. The Lords committee also proposes something that is obvious, but is rarely done – a check on whether the recommendations are ever put in place.
As Lord Norton, the committee chairman, said: “‘Lessons learned’ is an entirely vacuous phrase if lessons aren’t being learned because inquiry recommendations are ignored or delayed. Furthermore, it is insulting and upsetting for victims, survivors and their families who frequently hope that, from their unimaginable grief, something positive might prevail.”
The committee said there should be more non-statutory inquiries which are faster, cheaper and more flexible. Look at Covid. Countries such as Sweden and France completed their inquiries years ago. We have had a number of parliamentary select committees looking at what happened, reaching conclusions that the current inquiry will take another three years to replicate.
Public inquiries have become an all-pervasive part of our political culture, effectively supplanting the Royal Commissions of yore. Indeed, here is the rub. We set up inquiries to ask narrow questions about perceived wrongs or mistakes but no longer to confront the big issues. The Royal Commission model fell out of favour largely because governments simply ignored them and yet they are needed more than ever. How do we fix the NHS? Can we run the criminal justice system better? Why is productivity so low in this country? Is there a future without mass immigration?
Of course, they don’t always reach sensible conclusions and are often ignored. Harold Wilson joked that they “take minutes and waste years” (though his governments set up 10).
One of the last ever Royal Commissions was into the Long Term Care of the Elderly which reported in 1999, recommending that the costs should be met “according to need and paid for from general taxation.” With a rapidly ageing population this was just pie in the sky and never happened.
But a lot of these big, long-term questions remain unanswered and will only be resolved on a cross-party basis which is the supposed rationale behind the Royal Commission idea.
What is the future of the welfare state as the cost of benefits rise to unsustainable levels? What is the likely impact on jobs of the advance of Artificial Intelligence? Can we decarbonise without wrecking our economy and putting the lights out?
Why should we continue to rely on a bunch of inexperienced politicians and officials working behind closed doors to come up with answers to problems so great that they will haunt our grandchildren if we don’t start to deal with them now? Royal Commissions, independent of government and made up of external experts, at least tried to address these questions in a transparent way. It is time for their revival.