My Lords, it is a particular honour to move this Motion. The Select Committee on Statutory Inquiries was appointed last year as a special inquiry committee to review the report of the committee appointed in 2014 to engage in post-legislative scrutiny of the Inquiries Act 2005. The committee met throughout the year and I pay special tribute to its members for their commitment and support; to the clerk, Andrea Dowsett, for her superb clerkship; and to our policy analyst, Matthew Burton, whose capacity for data research was outstanding
Public inquiries are a notable feature of public life. Whenever there is a tragedy in which people suffer some catastrophic loss, be it physical or financial, there are calls for a public inquiry to investigate the circumstances and report on the causes—and, not unusually, to recommend what needs to be done to avoid a repetition. Ministers are empowered under the 2005 Act to establish inquiries with the power to take evidence under oath, although it is also possible to set up non-statutory inquiries, be they in the form of independent departmental reviews, independent panels or ad hoc inquiries.
Public inquiries are notable nowadays for the number, as well as the range, of subjects being examined. At their best, they undertake forensic examinations and establish the facts, the lessons to be drawn and the necessary actions to prevent a recurrence. They can also provide catharsis for those most closely affected by a tragedy. That may apply as much to non-statutory inquiries as to statutory ones. Implementing their recommendations may prevent further tragedies.
However, the fact that they are long drawn-out and costly attracts public criticism. As the Government noted in their response to the report:
“In the financial year 2023/24, the direct public cost of live UK inquiries was more than £130 million”
and, of those
“that have produced their final report in the last five years”,
it
“took on average nearly five years to”
produce a report. Also drawing notable criticism—a point to which I shall return—is the fact that they can produce recommendations that are not acted on.
Awareness that public inquiries are not engendering public trust to the extent that they are designed to do provides the underpinnings to our inquiry. To provide a clear focus, we addressed the extent to which public inquiries could be rendered more efficient in process and more effective in implementation. Although those calling for inquiries tend to favour statutory and judge-led inquiries, it was clear from the evidence that there was no optimum template for an inquiry. Non-statutory inquiries can produce benefits not found in statutory inquiries. They can engender candour and provide a means for greater and more informal involvement by victims and survivors. Judges may be good at being detached and able to weigh evidence, but they may be more used to adversarial than inquisitorial proceedings. On occasion, appointing a specialist in the field may prove more appropriate. It may also be appropriate to appoint a panel rather than a single chair.
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, for his introductory remarks and his clear, disciplined leadership of the committee. With no experience in this field on joining the committee, I was struck by how an industry has grown up around inquiries, where government action and follow-up can be haphazard in their implementation. I strongly support the main recommendation that government behaviour has to improve, with the setting up of a parliamentary committee with oversight to monitor the Government’s responses and to hold the Government to account in implementing the accepted recommendations. As the Government agreed in their response, inquiries must become effective, cost efficient and trusted to make a difference. I emphasise “trusted to make a difference” in relation to Hillsborough, which was some 35 years ago.
I had hoped that the committee would have examined the duty of candour a little deeper. However, as reported, the disciplined approach of the committee’s examinations precluded that—perhaps wisely, as it remains part of the controversial make-up of the Hillsborough law. The previous Conservative Government, in their response to Hillsborough in December 2023, ruled out acceptance of a duty of candour, which was confirmed by their rejection of Labour’s amendment to the then Victims and Prisoners Bill. Our party’s election manifesto states:
“Labour will introduce a ‘Hillsborough Law’ which will place a legal duty of candour on public servants and authorities, and provide legal aid for victims of disasters or state-related deaths”.
As discussed at Questions on Tuesday this week, implementation becomes entangled with the aspect of legal aid and the independent public advocate. I apologise to my noble friend the Minister for bringing up the duty of candour today, as it is not really part of the committee’s report, but can she say whether a way through to make progress could be made to separate the duty of candour from these other aspects and to introduce it through guidance? The Government’s response makes extensive reference to wider reforms to the framework of inquiries: on page 1; on page 4, when committing to publishing guidance; and repeatedly in annexe A and on later pages. It is difficult to name specific paragraphs when they are not numbered and there are no page numbers to the response.
My Lords, the Statutory Inquiries Committee, under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, who introduced this debate, has done parliamentarians, the Government and the public a great service through this excellent report, and I commend it on that.
It is a fitting review, 20 years after the Inquiries Act 2005, of how and whether the system is working. I normally refrain from self-congratulation about how wonderful the House of Lords is—and I had no involvement in this report—but I think this report is an exemplary example of what a second Chamber can, and does, do: deploying wisdom, experience and expertise to consider important matters of public policy.
One of the themes that most resonates with me is that of reinventing the wheel: losing sight of previous experience, conclusions and actions by failing to have a record or register of lessons learned or best practice. This report’s concern for reducing costs and delays in new inquiries by learning from previous ones is entirely justified, since the suffering of victims, families and survivors is simply prolonged not only by procrastination in setting up an inquiry but by unnecessarily extended timeframes and failure to implement recommendations.
When I was a local councillor 30 years ago in the 1990s, I would rage against the lack of corporate memory. For instance, when the power failed in a 23-storey housing block, was there an emergency generator and, if so, where was it? The local council neighbourhood office had no plans or records. Thank heavens there were a few elderly tenants around who had lived there since it was built in the 1960s, and we were able to get the lift put back on, which was crucial. Ever since, I have hated haphazard reliance on a few personal recollections in place of the rigorous central record-keeping and follow-up systems that ought to exist. I am therefore especially grateful for the very wise and important recommendations the committee has made about lessons learned, a bank of information and community of practice.
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Norton, for his wise, inclusive and perceptive chairmanship. I note the expertise of colleagues on the committee and the truly marvellous committee staff, most especially Andrea Dowsett and Matthew Burton.
The noble Lord, Lord Norton, has already outlined our main concerns and conclusions on the processes and the output of public inquiries. I will focus briefly on the value of setting up a public inquiries committee of Parliament to act on what was one of our most pressing concerns: the lack of implementation of recommendations arising from the House of Lords 2014 Select Committee report on the Inquiries Act 2005. This review, as we have heard, concluded with 33 recommendations, focusing largely on mechanisms to improve implementation.
The setting up of a dedicated unit, preferably within the Courts & Tribunals Service, was a key recommendation, the rationale being that an institutional memory of public inquiry forms and processes was lost following the closure of inquiries. As we know, this did not happen. In the interim, there have been significant ongoing and new inquiries on Manchester Arena, the Grenfell Tower fire, the Post Office Horizon scandal and the long-running use of infected blood, as well as the child sexual abuse tribunals. If the purpose of inquiries, whether statutory or not, is to insist that all measures possible must be taken in future to prevent catastrophic public disasters, the safeguards currently in place do not fulfil this duty. However, it was stated time and again that the failure to capture the experience of a given inquiry with a mandatory “lessons learned” report, preferably by the chair, was a leading factor in what some witnesses have referred to as reinventing the wheel each time and, more problematically, committing the same elementary errors in setting up and running an inquiry.
Many inquiries failed to meet their own aims because the recommendations were not implemented. The main obstacles cited by the majority of our witnesses included the absence of, among others, updated and easily available guidelines, ready advice on the more practical aspects of establishing an inquiry, and a forum especially for chairs to reflect on the long-term successes and failures of previous inquiries.
My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of the committee and as a participant in a number of public inquiries, whether as a witness, a lawyer or indeed a chair.
Why do we have more and more of them? What do they achieve? Setting up a public inquiry can be a useful political tool, kicking into touch an issue which is uncomfortable for the Government of the day. By the time the inquiry reports, the issue may well have become less politically salient than it was.
Inquiries almost always take longer than was intended. I say this not to impugn the integrity of chairs or other participants, but it is undoubtedly the case that the very notion of a public inquiry carries with it the expectation that it will leave no stone unturned and provide an answer to questions that courts or the normal political processes have insufficient time or resources to do. It needs a strong chair to keep the length of an inquiry under control.
The choice of that chair is crucial. Judges are frequently selected, and such inquiries are often very lawyer heavy, with the result that they can often mimic a particularly lengthy and thorough civil trial. Of course, they are very expensive. I therefore particularly endorse the recommendation of the committee that very careful thought should be given as to the identity of the chair—a judge is not always the answer—and restricting the terms of reference in such a way as to result in shorter and, we hope, cheaper inquiries.
I respect the role of lawyers in the important role they play, but the optics of serried ranks of lawyers at an inquiry and the impression that this is a great bonanza for the legal profession can be unfortunate. The choreography of these things matters.
The report suggests that a chair with specialist knowledge may well be suitable, rather than a judge. I am also impressed by the argument that a commissioning Minister should suggest an indicative deadline in terms of reference. The purpose of the inquiry may make it particularly important that it reports in time, so that it has maximum impact. Restricting recommendations to a manageable number is much more likely to result in legislation—if it is necessary—and command respect from all interested parties.
My Lords, I agree with all those who have warmly commended the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, and of Hull University, for his characteristically rigorous, accessible, practical report, and the other members of the committee.
The noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, said that in this place we are allowed to draw on our experience, knowledge and expertise, so, I thought I would. When I became a Minister, having a public inquiry was thought to be cowardly—kicking it into the long grass and creating trouble for your successors; you were not going to do anything about it, so “Let’s have an inquiry and forget about it”. Looking at the figures—the Institute for Government, of which I am a great fan, has a wonderful chart—we see that when I was a Secretary of State, there were two public inquiries in government at that time; there are now around 20. The big offenders were in the years 2000 and 2010. I am afraid that when Tony Blair was Prime Minister, there were 15, and when Gordon Brown was Prime Minister, there were 16—I do not wish to be politically partisan; I am simply making a comment.
My experience, having been to any number of child abuse inquiries before I was a Member of Parliament, was that they always said the same thing. Louis Blom-Cooper was my great friend; I am sorry that the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, is not here. The situation was always that nobody wanted to believe the unbelievable, so the child had fallen between the cracks, nobody had picked up the bruises and nobody had recognised that the child was never seen at school or at home. There was nothing new; it was always the same; we had been through all the misery in the court and then had to go through it all in an inquiry.
What professional is really going to spill the beans in a public inquiry? If you have an inquiry in private, they are much more likely to explain why they did not follow up, what went wrong that day and what the institutional issues were. Of course, judges know nothing about these matters. That is why I support those who think you should have an expert. Louis Blom-Cooper, although a judge, was an expert in the subject.
My Lords, it was a pleasure to serve on this committee, which was brilliantly chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth. I echo the tributes to our clerk and policy analyst.
The committee was set up against the background of widespread concern about the effectiveness of statutory inquiries—as well as their efficiency, but I am going to concentrate on their effectiveness. They are growing in number; they take too long; they cost too much; they lack consistency, and, at the end of the day, their recommendations are often not implemented. The committee addressed all these issues, but I will only add my voice to the question of how recommendations made by statutory inquiries should be monitored and enforced. I am afraid I am bound to repeat some of my colleagues and earlier speakers.
The evidence was clear that, at present, recommendations are often implemented inadequately, or indeed not at all. As the noble Lord, Lord Norton, pointed out, the result of not learning those lessons could be further disasters. If the Government, having accepted the recommendations of an inquiry, do not actually deliver on them, how should they be held to account? The phrase “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”—who will guard the guardians—occurs to me from my days of learning Latin.
We looked at a range of options for this monitoring. Inquiry chairs might have a continuing role in monitoring implementation. Some chairs have indeed tried, but many might not be available or willing to undertake such a commitment and, of course, there would not be continuity or consistency between different inquiries. We looked at the idea of victims and survivors playing a role in implementation monitoring, and it is interesting we have not heard much about that aspect so far. However, inevitably, that would be informal and might raise questions of objectivity. We looked at the Australian model of independent implementation monitors reporting to Parliament, which works well. But again, these monitors work only on individual inquiries. We considered other things, including the National Audit Office, a national oversight mechanism, or upgrading the role of the Cabinet Office Inquiries Unit. However, as we have already heard, the inevitable conclusion was that effective monitoring needed to be done by Parliament.
My Lords, it was a privilege to serve on the Select Committee. I note that I have appeared before one public inquiry, the IICSA inquiry, and I hope it is not two as I stand ready for the Covid inquiry. Last business on a Friday is an antithesis to the importance that public inquiries play in the public mind. In a 2014 report to your Lordships’ House, there were 33 recommendations, of which 19 were accepted by the Government. None of those accepted recommendations was implemented. It is ironic that so many recommendations of public inquiries suffer the same fate. This is causing harm, as noble Lords have mentioned, to the reputations of inquiries, to victims and to the taxpayer.
Victims are harmed first by the difficulty in getting a public inquiry, involving years of campaigning and fighting through every avenue you can think of—media, multiple layers of politicians who come and go, even celebrities. The evidence to our committee on this issue from Bill Wright of Haemophilia Scotland was compelling and exhausting even just to listen to. Therefore, calling for a public inquiry would be an important function of the new public inquiries Select Committee that our report recommended to Parliament. It would also be an important go-to place for MPs and Peers who are being lobbied. I join the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, in saying that, while the decision to create such a committee is for Parliament, I would be interested to know His Majesty’s Government’s views on the matter, as I expect that they will be consulted.
Then, of course, victims go through the years of an inquiry. For many, that is cathartic and healing, but then too often, as has been mentioned, they see recommendations that they believe will prevent future harm being accepted but ignored. So, for many, further campaigning then begins. What was supposed to be the end of the road is not. This is no way to treat already injured people, so if His Majesty’s Government do not support the recommendation for the public inquiries Select Committee, what mechanism will they put in place to ensure that recommendations that are accepted are implemented, or explanations given as to why implementation is no longer possible? Of course, even if a recommendation is enacted, such as that for compensation, schemes currently being run by the Government can be cumbersome, causing further harm—the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, recognised that. At the moment, there are similar concerns about the infected blood scheme: will His Majesty’s Government provide an update on progress?
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However, the most notable and most troubling feature, and one that clearly most engaged witnesses who had been involved in inquiries, be it as chairs or officials or as victims and survivors, was that there is no means of ensuring that recommendations are acted on—and, indeed, no means of monitoring what has happened to recommendations. Once an inquiry has reported, it ceases to exist. It relies on others to act. The problem is that there may be no action. This clearly has the potential to undermine trust in the process, a potential that appears to have been realised.
The most egregious failure is where recommendations that could result in preventing a repetition of a disaster are not implemented. We heard of instances where, if recommendations had been acted on, deaths may have been avoided. It was clear from the evidence we received that if inquiries were to fulfil the purposes for which they were established, there had to be some change both to the process of establishing them and to monitoring what happens once they have reported. We therefore made recommendations, both in our own right and as a follow-up to recommendations made in the 2014 report.
To render the process more efficient, we recommended, where appropriate, consulting and involving victims and survivors in determining the terms of reference and providing guidance to those setting up inquiries on options for involving such groups. We recommended including in the terms of reference an indicative deadline for the final inquiry report, with ministerial approval possible to extend the deadline, and including a requirement that inquiries provide regular public updates on their work and consider issuing interim reports, especially in cases where inquiries are expected to be lengthy.
We also favoured enhancing the role of the Cabinet Office inquiries unit to ensure the sharing of best practice. All too often, chairs are left to reinvent the wheel when it comes to setting up an inquiry. We regarded sharing best practice and learning from past inquiries as essential. We therefore recommended that inquiry terms of reference include an obligation to produce a lessons learned paper and a working paper on what worked well and what could be improved—these to be submitted to the inquiries unit. All this will require the inquiries unit to be adequately resourced. We wanted to see the wider creation of a community of practice for all public inquiries.
These recommendations, we believe, will enhance the efficiency of inquiries. In terms of effectiveness, it is crucial that an inquiry’s recommendations are the start, not the end of a process. Presently, too many reports constitute the end product, with no action taken on many or any of the recommendations and with no systematic means of monitoring the Government’s actions in the light of the report.
The Government are legally obliged to respond to a report from an inquiry established under the 2005 Act, but they are not required to accept any recommendations or to provide a detailed explanation as to why not. When an inquiry into a tragedy makes recommendations designed to prevent a recurrence and no action is taken on those recommendations, not only is it a body blow to victims and survivors but it undermines public trust and calls into question the point of holding inquiries.
We, therefore, focused on how inquiry recommendations can be monitored and, if necessary, pursued when no action is taken by government. We recommended the appointment of a Joint Select Committee on public inquiries. If a Joint Committee is not agreed by both Houses, we propose the appointment by this House of a sessional Select Committee. As we record in the report, a parliamentary committee is superior to other options because it plays to the strengths of the existing committee system.
We recommend that its functions include monitoring the implementation of accepted public inquiry and major inquest recommendations and maintaining a publicly available online tracker. It would be able to conduct thematic research and meta-analysis of recommendations, enabling it to identify systemic policy failures and prevent future disasters. As a result of its work, it would also be able to make recommendations to the Inquiries Unit on best practice for establishing and running inquiries. If necessary, of course, it could hold its own parliamentary inquiry. The 1999 House of Lords inquiry into the 1994 Chinook helicopter crash shows that a parliamentary inquiry can fulfil the same purpose as a public inquiry and bring redress, even when the Government decline to establish a statutory inquiry.
Vesting power in a single committee would reduce duplication and ensure more systematic and comprehensive scrutiny than if spread among committees. It would, as we record, be constitutionally sounder to vest Parliament with this responsibility to hold the Government to account than to vest it in an independent arm’s-length body. If it is a sessional committee of this House, it will play to the strengths of the House in terms of its membership.
The fundamental point is the need to have a body to monitor and report on the implementation of recommendations accepted by the Government. If it is a parliamentary committee, it will also have the capacity to pursue Ministers if they fail to act. There are obvious resource implications, but, as I have stressed, the need to achieve public trust in public inquiries is paramount.
Given our remit, we also tracked what happened to the recommendations made in the 2014 report. Of the 33 recommendations, which we list in Appendix 4, the Government at the time accepted 19. However, as far as we can tell, none has been implemented. In its response to the 2014 report, the Government committed, where appropriate, to legislate when parliamentary time allowed—but it has not been allowed, so there has been no change. In our report, we reiterate 26 of the recommendations made by the committee.
The Government’s response to our report was much delayed, for reasons that are unclear, but in content it is very welcome. In a meeting I had with the Minister for the Cabinet Office, he made clear that the Government took the issue seriously. That is reflected in their response. It is especially pleasing to see the word “accept” appear so many times. Of the recommendations that derived from our investigation, they have accepted all those related to the efficiency of inquiries. They have also accepted nine of the 26 recommendations that we reiterated from the 2014 report; one has been partially accepted and eight are marked as under consideration.
On effectiveness, the Government acknowledge that our key recommendation—that a parliamentary committee be established—is a matter for Parliament. However, they state that, given the importance of the issues identified by the committee, they are
“actively considering whether there is scope for wider reforms to the frameworks within which inquiries are set up, run and concluded”.
They expand on that point, including examining
“how best to ensure more effective transparency and accountability around the response to inquiry recommendations and the implementation of those which are accepted”.
Given that, it will be especially valuable today to hear from the Minister on how far the Government have advanced in undertaking their examination and when we may expect their active consideration to bear fruit.
Such plans do not detract from the need for a parliamentary committee on public inquiries, for both the constitutional and practical reasons embodied in our report. The two developments—the reform of the inquiries process by the Government and the establishment of a parliamentary committee—are complementary, not conflicting, and together can help to deliver public inquiries that enhance public trust. For that neat reason, we need to pursue the Government on their proposals for reform and to press both Houses to establish a Joint Committee.
We have the potential to ensure that public inquiries more effectively meet the needs of victims and survivors and enhance public trust in the process. It is incumbent on us to realise that potential. I commend the report to the House, and I beg to move.
The Minister will be aware that the NHS has operated under a duty of candour following the Francis report on Mid Staffs, with regulations in 2014 followed up by a National Health Service evaluation last year by Jess Hornsby. The guidance on duty of candour in the NHS was updated in October 2020. It can be debated how effective this has been; culture change can be difficult.
My contention to the Government is that this experience could inform a similar introduction on all public servants and authorities. The previous Government sought to address this by laying on chief constables of each police force a duty of candour. I pay tribute to the Reverend Bishop James Jones for his extensive work, enhanced by the Welsh Government signing the Hillsborough charter in March this year, followed by a further 50 public bodies. This complements the proposed Hillsborough law and could be replicated here in incremental steps along the way, following implementations of this committee’s accepted recommendations.
I look forward to hearing other contributions today. The encouraging aspect to reforms in this area is that they remain bipartisan through continuous improvement. As the committee’s report states at paragraph 49, it adds insult to injury if recommendations are not subsequently implemented.
The report’s title includes the words “Enhancing public trust”, and that is the key issue. Pollsters regularly report findings of loss of trust in politicians but, while some individuals undoubtedly behave badly, I think it is more about loss of trust in governance and institutions, with promises broken, pledges unfulfilled, mistakes repeated and long delays in recognition of harms caused, let alone any accountability for failure, redress or compensation.
We have had all too many examples of failures to deliver adequate or timely accountability, redress or restitution. When inquiries lead to real change or justice—like the Hillsborough inquiry, which overturned decades of cover-ups—public faith can grow. Conversely, if recommendations are ignored or the process feels like a stalling tactic or kicking the issue into the long grass, cynicism festers. The Post Office scandal, on which we had a debate two months ago, is outrageously still dragging on because the Post Office and Government have failed to deliver fair compensation, despite an interim report on that topic nearly two years ago from inquiry chairman Sir Wyn Williams.
Public disillusion and loss of trust are very damaging to maintenance of our liberal democracy. I think the core proposals of this report, for a new joint parliamentary Select Committee—a parliamentary inquiries committee—to undertake formal implementation monitoring, and an accompanying beefing up of the Inquiries Unit in the Cabinet Office to share best practice and learn from past inquiries, are vital.
In my experience, although the victims, survivors and family members who have experienced failings, mistakes, incompetence and disasters certainly want accountability—and, if appropriate, apologies, redress and compensation—they have an overwhelming altruistic desire to try to make sure that no one else suffers the agonies that they have suffered. The content of this report, which is possibly slightly dry on the surface, is about individuals and personal suffering. Trust depends on how independent, transparent and effective each inquiry proves to be. We can aspire to a better system, and this report, if implemented, would make a big contribution to achieving that ambition.
The committee believed and believes that a joint parliamentary committee should be established, the main purpose of which would be to conduct post-legislative scrutiny on implementation. Recommendations might in turn exert some pressure on government, help to shorten the length of future inquiries and possibly also bring down the costs of inquiries.
The second major recommendation on strengthening public inquiries is to boost support for the existing Cabinet unit, which we all agreed does a good job. There is an obvious need for a repository of good practice, ranging from the practical details of setting up an inquiry to engaging more effectively with expert opinion, including non-governmental experts. Some of the mechanisms might include insisting on a “lessons learned” report on what went well and not so well, commissioning further research, updating the 2012 guide, establishing a forum for chairs, further online promotion of the unit and its services, and liaising with the Civil Service and policymakers to arrive at doable recommendations.
The changes our report suggests are not in themselves radical but more a deepening of what already exists. Improvement in both the efficiency of future inquiries and the outcomes would contribute to the purpose of inquiries, which is to take all measures to prevent the catastrophic conditions that provoke an inquiry in the first place.
At the centre of the recommendations is the need for lessons to be learned and the sharing of good practice between inquiries. We heard of the Inquiries Unit, which provides advice and guidance to departments, but it did not seem to be quite as well known as it ought to be. We made various recommendations as to how it could be better and to make sure that the knowledge that has been acquired is sufficiently disseminated.
As others have done, I pay tribute to our chair, the noble Lord, Lord Norton, who followed our own recommendations by keeping the inquiry very much under control and making sure that our recommendations were short but highly focused. I also pay tribute to Andrea Dowsett, Matthew Burton and Emily Tallentire, who played such an important role.
I know that the Minister will respond to this report when she winds up. I am afraid I have one rather difficult question for her. It may be a question she cannot immediately answer. I posed it to the Inquiries Unit during the various hearings we had with witnesses but received no reply. It is something I have heard about from a number of those who take part in public inquiries on a regular basis. Very often, particularly in high-profile cases, a witness will give evidence to a public inquiry and that witness will already have given evidence before a Select Committee. They may say something to the inquiry inconsistent with what they said before the committee, or they may add or subtract something in a way that is perhaps significant. But the practice has grown up that no reference can be made to evidence given in Select Committees because it is regarded by those advising various chairs that this would impugn proceedings in Parliament in such a way as to violate the Bill of Rights. I invite the Minister to respond to this, because this practice, which I do not think is sound in law, is inhibiting the proper inquiry into a number of important issues.
In my case, there was a subject which was new—Christopher Clunis murdered Jonathan Zito; he was a psychiatric patient and, as with the child abuse story, nobody had followed up; he was okay in hospital and okay when he came out, but not okay when he stopped taking his medication. To me, this was an issue which we had to really ram home and reinforce to people. Since that very good inquiry—a QC, Jean Ritchie, did a very good job; I am not against lawyers on all occasions—we have had any number of inquiries on the same subject. We do not need to have the same inquiry time and again.
When it came to Beverley Allitt, the nurse who was murdering patients, I asked Sir Cecil Clothier, a QC and former health service ombudsman, to have an inquiry in private. He did it in nine months and the recommendations were excellent. We do not need to have a judge-led inquiry for Lucy Letby—there is very little new there; we have had a court case—but the key point that my noble friend Lord Norton makes is that there was no follow-up. When people talk to me about Lucy Letby, they ask, “What happened to your recommendations?” I say, “I don’t know”, because I had moved on.
The chair of an inquiry is critical—this is a serious point—and I am so pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, is going to speak shortly. He is not a QC, I understand, or a distinguished judge. He did a brilliant report on Soham, as have so many others. Currently, Sir Jonathan Michael, a very distinguished doctor who was chief executive of Saint Thomas’ and of the Radcliffe, is investigating David Fuller and the appalling Tunbridge Wells and Maidstone hospital cases. Our colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Lampard, has done some extremely good inquiries. So let us get a chair who knows what they are doing, and not fourth time lucky as in the ridiculous child sex abuse case, which should be used as an example of bad practice—who wants a QC from New Zealand to do this?—and not like the Infected Blood Inquiry, where we should have had a panel with people on it who actually knew about health. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Phillips, had a geneticist and a public servant with him.
I know that cannot speak any longer, although I really want to. I commend the report. There is so much more to say—please, can we have a longer debate next time?
It has always been possible for parliamentary Select Committees to review the implementation of inquiry recommendations, but this has happened for only six out of 68 inquiries since 1990. Something more is needed, as proposed in our recommendation for the Liaison Committee of this House. The Government, in their response, note that these are “for Parliament” to address, but that should not let them—or the Minister in her response—off the hook of explaining how they propose to improve the frameworks around inquiries and, in particular, in terms of monitoring. We recommended that the Liaison Committee should both monitor the implementation of our report and look to establish a new committee—either a Joint Committee of both Houses or a Lords committee—to monitor implementation.
I will end with a question and a rallying cry. First, I ask the Minister: how and when will the Government act upon the recommendations they have accepted, including undertaking a wider reform of the frameworks around inquiries as they said in their response? It would be more than a pity if a further committee has to be set up some time in the 2030s to explore why the recommendations of this one have not been implemented.
Secondly, I look to our chair, the noble Lord, Lord Norton, to promote, drive, and co-ordinate a campaign to persuade the powers that be on the Liaison Committee that a new public inquiries committee is not only badly needed but would represent an important way for Parliament and this House to contribute to the greater effectiveness of statutory inquiries, both in meeting the reasonable expectations of the public and, even more, in avoiding the potentially catastrophic result of lessons not being learned from findings.
The committee heard much evidence that, even with an Inquiries Unit, lessons are not learned from one inquiry to the next. Besides leading to time delays and duplication, this is a waste of public money. The financial cost, we have heard, is affecting the reputation of inquiries. So, in addition to the committee’s recommendations, is the Minister aware of any efforts to compare the costs of various inquiries across the different government departments? Are they learning from each other on better value for money, monitoring lawyers’ fees and infrastructure costs? Are former chairs and counsel ever asked how money could have been saved? Could the use of AI limit the costs? While the process to allow Covid health workers, the bereaved and victims of Covid to tell their experiences, in a process similar to IICSA’s Truth Project, is valuable, is that really within the scope of a statutory inquiry, as Sir Brian Leveson told us in written evidence?
Finally, I believe that His Majesty’s Government should not shy away from narrowing the terms of reference and giving indicative time limits and indicative budgets that are extendable only with ministerial approval. Enough of these inquiries have now been done to know approximately how long one will take. Also, in accordance with some of the evidence we took from former inquiry chairs, I do not think that parliamentarians should shy away from asking Questions of Ministers in Parliament. These are not civil or criminal proceedings with chairs that can be influenced by such Questions or Answers. These inquiries should not, I believe, be the long grass through which parliamentary scrutiny cannot peek.