Two years is a very long time in politics. When Her Majesty the Queen announced the government’s plan to set up a royal commission on criminal justice in December 2019, the phrase ‘you’re on mute’ had barely been heard in a courtroom.

The intervening 26 months of pandemic which followed at least provided an excuse for Lord Wolfson as the justice minister this week fobbed off questions from peers about when the commission might get under way. 

Traditionally, of course, royal commissions were a way for ministers to park awkward issues - the Irish famine, capital punishment, the behaviour of the press - in touch for a successor government to deal with. (The record may be held by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, which sat from 1890 to 2015.)

But delaying the very starting date is a new and untried wheeze. The government is ‘still focused, in due course, [on] having a royal commission’, Wolfson insisted. He just did not know when. Or, at the very least, he could not say.

There were audible groans in the chamber at the minister’s reply to Baroness Butler-Sloss, the former president of the family division who asked: ‘When is it intended to start the royal commission?’ ‘I’m afraid I can’t go any further than [what] I have already said,’ Wolfson said. ‘We are looking at it.’

Obiter would suggest 26 months is quite long enough to look at looking into something, particularly something as important as criminal justice.

Incidentally, the last royal commission on criminal justice, the Runciman Commission, reported in July 1993, a mere 28 months after it was announced, the day after the release of the Birmingham Six.

In July 2020, the House of Lords was told that the upcoming royal commission may not report until 2022. Given the current political maelstrom, the chances of it reporting to the ministers who set it up look slimmer by the day. 

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