Do you have an issue you care about? You should probably be calling for a public inquiry into it, then. Public inquiries have become so popular in British politics that there are currently 25 running at the moment, and barely a week goes by without an MP calling for a new one at Prime Minister’s Questions. Last week MPs on the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee announced an inquiry into inquiries, which follows another inquiry into inquiries by the House of Lords Statutory Inquiries Committee last year. That inquiry was in part looking at whether the previous inquiry, held ten years before, had managed to have any lasting impact (it hadn’t, and neither had many of the public inquiries themselves in the interim).
Before you run out of breath, I bring you news of another inquiry into inquiries, this time within government. I understand that the Cabinet Office is also examining the inquiries system. The minister responsible, Josh Simons, has been leading a ‘policy sprint review’ (which at least gives us a break for one sentence from the i-word) of the current system, with former chairs and officials offering their own views on what needs to change.
Some of those who have spoken to the Cabinet Office have left with the impression that the government may be open to changing primary legislation, though the chances of this happening imminently seem rather remote, given other priorities (including implementing the findings of other inquiries). I understand no decision has been made on how ambitious reform of the system could end up being, but the review has been timed to coincide with the passage of the Hillsborough Law, currently making its way through the Commons in the Public Office (Accountability) Bill. That law, incidentally, came from a non-statutory inquiry, rather than the form popularly considered to be the gold standard whenever there has been a scandal of a full statutory inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005.
That act has now been on the statute books for long enough that its flaws are reasonably clear, one of them being that while inquiries are popular, they don’t often lead to lasting or well-designed change to prevent a similar scandal happening in the future. These days inquiries are generally quite good at finding out what happened, but given they officially cease to exist once they have published their final report, their chairs cannot have confidence that what they recommended will ever make it off a shelf in Whitehall. Some, like Alexis Jay, have had to become unofficial and voluntary campaigners for their own reports for years after publication. The Hillsborough Law itself came from the independent panel report published back in 2012.
Of course, inquiries also cost a lot to run and even more to respond to when they call for compensation for victims. So there is an incentive for ministers to think quite hard about what merits an inquiry, and what will actually come of it.
When I approached the Cabinet Office about this review, a spokesperson said: ‘The Government must learn lessons from scandals such as Hillsborough and we have been clear about the need to increase transparency, accountability and support for victims. We are passing the Hillsborough Law to do exactly this.’ It is admirable, at least, that this quote does not include the word ‘inquiries’. In the meantime, they’ll probably end up announcing a few more in the next few years, largely because a full statutory inquiry is still one of the best political ways that a government can suggest it is taking a problem seriously, even if that suggestion isn’t borne out in reality.
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