Could you name the 18 public inquiries currently open in the UK? I will start you off: the deadly fire at Grenfell Tower; the overreach of undercover policing; the abuse of children in care in Scotland; the mistreatment of migrants at the Brook House removal centre; the conduct of British troops in the war in Afghanistan; the abuse of patients at Muckamore Abbey hospital in Northern Ireland; responses to the Covid-19 pandemic; the deaths of mental health inpatients in Essex; the Post Office Horizon scandal; the responsibility of the state in the Omagh bombings; and failings at the Countess of Chester hospital, where Lucy Letby worked. Others concern deaths in custody, and other fatalities where the state could have been at fault.
Just this cursory list tells us that the focus of public inquiries – which are about vitally important and sensitive issues – ranges widely. This reflects the vague criteria for setting one up: a public inquiry is an independent, ad hoc institution initiated by the government to investigate a matter of “major public concern”. Originally seen as a last resort, they have in recent years become a routine response to the UK’s numerous public crises. There are almost twice as many open inquiries now as there were in 2017, when there were nine, and the last time there were none running was in 1991. As the number of public inquiries has increased, they have also become more costly, lengthy and complex.
Now, in a sign that bereaved families are losing faith in public inquiries, a coalition of groups affected has urged the government to create an independent body to monitor them and make sure they are not “left to gather dust”.
When inquiries work, they expose wrongdoing, give proper acknowledgment to victims of injustice, and provide the opportunity for genuine change and accountability. One example of a far-reaching change is the introduction of criminal record checks by employers, known as disclosure and barring service (DBS), which came about as a result of the 2004 inquiry into the Soham murders, when two girls were killed by their school’s caretaker. But it really is time to ask whether the overuse of public inquiries is undermining the very trust they are supposed to shore up.
Take the child sexual abuse inquiry, which got under way in 2015 following high-profile scandals about famous figures such as Jimmy Savile, and was beset by problems from the outset. Its brief was “to consider whether public bodies – and other non-state institutions – have taken seriously their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse”. This is extremely broad, and it conducted 15 investigations, leading to separate reports on religious institutions, residential schools, the internet, and councils in Nottinghamshire and London.
Within a couple of years, major victims’ groups, including the Shirley Oaks Survivors’ Association (Sosa), which represents 2,000 survivors of abuse in Lambeth, withdrew. Sosa questioned the inquiry’s independence, given a change of chair and the number of Home Office personnel involved. “We had already achieved compensation for our members, so our objective was for the public to know the truth about what happened. But we realised we were never going to get the truth,” Sosa founder, Raymond Stevenson, told me. “It was an absolute failure, and a waste of public money. Millions of pounds were spent, and nothing has come out of it.”
It took seven years for the inquiry to conclude and publish its final report, which made 20 recommendations. Suella Braverman, the then-home secretary, offered only a vague response, rejecting some of the measures and refusing to commit to others. At the time, an editorial in the Guardian argued: “If [recommendations] can be ignored or delayed, then what is the point?”
This problem is not unique to the child sex abuse inquiry: once an inquiry delivers its finding, there is nothing in place to hold the government to account. Sometimes, select committees follow up on progress, but more often, they don’t. The high-profile inquiry into the neglect of patients at Mid Staffordshire hospital, published in 2013, made recommendations about patient safety that were accepted by the government but still have not been implemented almost a decade later. There is an inherent tension here: inquiries are nominally technocratic or procedural, but often get into political issues, which ministers see as their prerogative. But given that the process is supposed to shore up public trust, ministers should be compelled to explicitly reject or accept recommendations, giving reasons – rather than the current situation, where they often quietly fade away.
Even when inquiries do appear to prompt a more immediate and concrete response from government, the length of the process can mean it feels like a hollow victory for campaigners. This May, the inquiry into the infected blood scandal published its report after six years of investigation. It examined how 30,000 people were infected with viruses such as HIV and hepatitis between the 1970s and 1990s after being given contaminated blood, and the official cover-up that had prevented the truth from coming out earlier. The then-prime minister, Rishi Sunak, apologised, saying it was a “day of shame for the British state” and pledging to pay “whatever it costs” in compensation to those affected.
But for some victims, it was too little too late. “Nobody is going to be held to account,” Colette Wintle, who was first infected with hepatitis through NHS treatment for her haemophilia in the 1970s, told me. “They will say, ‘We’ll pay the compensation’, and then carry on as normal. I don’t believe they are truly going to change the system to make sure something like this can never happen again.” By the time the inquiry’s report was published, more than 3,000 victims had already died.
Public inquiries are not this slow everywhere in the world. The UK’s Covid-19 inquiry, for example, was launched in 2021, and there is no official timeline for when it will end. By comparison, Sweden’s Covid inquiry reported in February 2022, New Zealand’s is due by the end of this year, and Belgium has already approved the policy recommendations that its inquiry made. The glacial speed is at least in part due to the ever widening scope of British public inquiries, which increasingly don’t simply find facts on specific incidents, but make assessment of entire aspects of the culture. (The Leveson inquiry, for instance, expanded beyond phone hacking to assess the ethics and practices of the British press at large.) What these long running inquiries often produce is a vicious circle, whereby the process set up to address low trust ends up diminishing it further.
An independent body to monitor government responses to inquiries – as the new coalition of groups has demanded – would be an important first step to renewing trust. But if justice delayed is justice denied, then inquiries that take years to report, after taking decades to get off the ground, look as though they are simply kicking difficult issues into the long grass. Until this changes, any government that launches a public inquiry will appear as though they are avoiding accountability, rather than taking it.
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