As the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry and the Covid-19 inquiry continue their work, Philip Norton explains how public inquiries can operate very differently, depending on how they are established. He discusses the numerous ways inquiries can operate, analyses post-legislative scrutiny of the relevant legislation, and outlines the aims of a new parliamentary inquiry on the subject, which he chairs.

Recent years have seen some notable disasters and scandals, including the Manchester Arena bombings, the Grenfell Tower fire, the miscarriage of justice in the Post Office Horizon IT scandal, the use of infected blood, and child sexual abuse. Whenever they occur, there is a natural desire to identify what went wrong and what can be done to prevent a reoccurrence. These tasks are typically vested in a public inquiry. Such inquiries have become a significant feature of public life. 

Setting up public inquiries is not a new activity. However, as a study by the Institute for Government has shown, public inquiries have become more numerous. Prior to the enactment of the Inquiries Act 2005, there were different statutory bases for inquiries. The principal one was the Tribunals and Inquiries (Evidence) Act 1921. It was regarded as cumbersome, requiring both Houses of Parliament to approve a Secretary of State establishing an inquiry with the same powers as the High Court. When inquiries were established, they tended to be lengthy and expensive.   

As the government’s figures show, not all public inquiries are established by statute. Ministers have the option of setting up an inquiry on a non-statutory basis. These tend to be favoured for reasons of time and cost. A non-statutory inquiry can be conducted relatively quickly. However, public pressure often leads to the creation of a statutory inquiry or a non-statutory inquiry being converted into a statutory one. Statutory inquiries have the advantage of being empowered to summon witnesses and take evidence under oath. Despite the Act imposing a duty on chairs to consider financial cost, they can still be expensive as well as lengthy, sometimes costing millions of pounds and sitting for years. Although ministers may be critical of this, the public tend to favour the statutory over the non-statutory. A survey carried out by Crest Advisory found that 75% of those questioned felt that an inquiry should investigate the event or events as thoroughly as possible even if this means the inquiry taking longer or costing more than was originally anticipated. 

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The public inquiry into COVID-19 published its terms of reference earlier this summer, with its first ‘promise’ being that ‘People who have suffered during the pandemic will be at the heart of the inquiry’s work’. Simon Burall, Senior Associate at Involve, asks what this really means in practice, and suggests three questions we should ask ourselves to determine whether this promise is kept.

We have been locked down at least twice (and more depending on where you live in the country), schools have been closed, businesses lost and household budgets squeezed. To date, there have been over 200,000 deaths with COVID-19 on the death certificate. Nobody has remained untouched by the pandemic.

The UK COVID-19 Public Inquiry has been set-up to explore the impact of the pandemic, to examine the UK’s response, and to learn lessons for the future. Given the widespread impact of the pandemic, the Chair of the Inquiry, Baroness (Heather) Hallett is absolutely right to want to put the public at the heart of its work. It should be celebrated that this is the first of seven ‘promises’ that the inquiry has published. However, this ambition – and the inquiry in general – comes with risks. If this ambition is not met, and the public deem the inquiry to have failed to pass fair judgement, it could further undermine existing low levels of public trust in our politics.

So, this blogpost lays out three questions we will be asking to judge the extent to which the inquiry is keeping this promise, as it progresses in the months to come.

Are the public part of passing judgement and proposing plans for the future, or just witnesses?

The inquiry has been formally constituted and has a legal status as laid out in the 2005 Inquiries Act. The act lays out the statutory framework for the appointment of the Chair, how it should take evidence and produce its report. This will obviously, and rightly, restrict the ways in which the public can be involved, but there is much more the inquiry could do beyond publishing standard consultation questions, inviting a tiny number of members of the public as witnesses and meeting with specific groups which were particularly affected.

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Much of the media reaction to the Chilcot report has inevitably focused on what it says about Tony Blair. However, the report also offers plenty of powerful long-term insights about decision making. David Laughrin suggests that there is a danger that these lessons will not reach their intended audience. Sir John Chilcot and his team should therefore be urged to build on their seven years’ lifetime investment, and invest some more on its implementation. They would have much to contribute.

 My wife has just finished reading War and Peace, a long read though apparently shorter than the Chilcot report. She believes that everyone should read Tolstoy’s gripping thesis about why countries should not go to war lightly and why older men and women should not be trusted to put young men’s or women’s lives at risk. But she suspects that this will not happen in these days when tweets are more read than novels or newspapers or indeed the Chilcot Report.

After reading the 911 paragraphs of the Executive Summary of the Chilcot report – surely some kind of record for an Executive Summary? – I fear the same fate for Chilcot as for Tolstoy. But future academics and deliverers of learning and development for civil servants, themselves a scarce commodity at present, surely need to bend their efforts to ensure that we do better.

For although Chilcot acknowledges that the particular set of circumstances that led to the war in Iraq and its inadequate follow up are unlikely to be repeated, there are plenty of powerful long term insights lurking in the lucid prose. Some are so stark that they do not even lurk, but jump out of the pages.

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