Relatives of three people killed by a paranoid schizophrenic in Nottingham in 2023 welcomed the prime minister’s announcement last week of what they understood would be a statutory inquiry.
The families were concerned that if an inquiry had no powers to compel the production of evidence it would fail to uncover institutional failings that allowed Valdo Calocane to carry out the stabbings. He was detained in a secure hospital last year after admitting manslaughter.
A judicial inquiry set up under the Inquiries Act 2005 is seen as the most powerful and important type of inquiry, according to a report last September from a House of Lords committee chaired by Professor Lord Norton of Louth. But the committee recommended that ministers should decide whether an inquiry with statutory powers was needed on a case-by-case basis.
Ministers should also consider whether they always needed a chair with judicial experience. A panel of experts might be more suitable. Last week, a former head of the government legal service was appointed by the home secretary to find out whether MI5 officers had deliberately lied when giving false evidence in a court case.
Responding to Norton’s committee last week, the government agreed that there should not be a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to establishing public inquiries. Nick Thomas-Symonds, a Cabinet Office minister, said a non-statutory inquiry could be an effective and more flexible model, achieving its purpose more swiftly and at lower cost.
Norton’s committee had recommended that, where appropriate, ministers should consult victims and survivors on an inquiry’s terms of reference. Again, the government agreed. It also accepted that an ‘indicative deadline’ might be appropriate in some circumstances, with interim reports as necessary.
All these recommendations reflect existing practice and are easy enough for the government to take on board. What the government was less willing to promise were the legislative changes and additional resources proposed by the Lords committee.
It was telling that some expert witnesses who gave evidence to Norton recommended the creation of a central inquiries unit that would advise newly-appointed inquiry chairs on best practice. What these experts did not seem to know is that just such a unit has existed since 2019. That’s understandable, since the unit does not publicise its existence or its advice. Instead, an out-of-date photocopied handbook is passed on from one inquiry chair to the next.
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Norton’s committee said a version of the handbook should be published. The inquiries unit needed the resources to establish a ‘community of practice’ for academic, legal and policy experts, as well as civil servants, former inquiry chairs and secretaries and representatives of victims and survivors’ groups. In its response, the government said that learning lessons and sharing best practice would remain a priority for the inquiries unit.
But the main problem with public inquiries of all kinds is that there is no mechanism to ensure that their recommendations are properly considered and, if accepted by ministers, put into effect. A similar problem arises with the reports made by coroners who believe that action should be taken by an individual or organisation to prevent future deaths. At the beginning of last month, the chief coroner published a list of more than 35 ‘non-responses’ to these reports in 2024 alone.
But who should monitor implementation of public inquiry reports? It would not be proper for a serving judge – or perhaps even a lawyer – to lobby for reform. And the chair’s appointment usually comes to an end when an inquiry reports.
So, incidentally, did Norton’s inquiry. But it recommended the establishment of a permanent joint committee of parliament that would hold ministers to account. In addition to monitoring the implementation of accepted public inquiry and major inquest recommendations through policy research and liaison with ministers, it would collect all inquiry reports on a single website and maintain a public tracker showing the status of individual recommendations.
‘This recommendation is for parliament,’ the government said firmly. It promised to update MPs and peers ‘on its intentions for any wider reforms of the frameworks around inquiries’. New guidance will be published.
But the government rejected recommendations – from this and an earlier Lords committee – that would have transferred some powers from ministers to inquiries themselves. It found ‘serious and growing criticism of their cost, duration and effectiveness’.
Norton said last week that there was much to welcome in the government’s response but the devil was in the detail. The ‘commitment to reviewing the current system is a positive first step’, he added.
But it seems to me that a parliamentary statutory inquiries committee is unlikely to be set up without the government’s blessing. We may no longer be reinventing the wheel each time a new inquiry is established but the same failures and disasters will continue to come round again until we put more effort into implementation.
joshua@rozenberg.net
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