Ministers attacked for setting up public inquiries with inadequate powers

The Government is failing to use the Inquiries Act 2005 enough, and is setting up inquiries outside the Act with "inadequate powers", a House of Lords committee has said.

In a report, The Inquiries Act 2005: post-legislative scrutiny, the committee also called on the Government to set up a central inquiries unit within the Courts and Tribunals Service to assist all public inquiries and pass on best practice.

The report’s findings included:

• The overall framework of the 2005 Act was good, but ministers “should be using it more and not setting up non-statutory inquiries, i.e. those not under the Act”.
• Inquiry panels should have a single member, rather than a panel.
• Victims and families should routinely meet with inquiry chairmen “and their needs must be handled sensitively”.
• An inquiry’s recommendations should be formally accepted or rejected by those bodies to whom they have been directed. These bodies should have a three-month deadline in which to respond.
• If accepted, there should be a formal implementation plan.
• Recommendations from the report to change the Act and the associated inquiry rules would “lead to shorter, easier to manage and less expensive inquiries”.

Lord Shutt of Greetland, chair of the Committee on the Inquiries Act 2005, said that when a new inquiry was carried out, “often at vast expense”, it was as though previous ones had never happened.

He added: “We really need to make the most of any lessons learned from past inquiries, and make the most of our collective knowledge and proficiency in this field.

“To do this we strongly urge the Government to set up a central inquiries unit. This would be a new centre of expertise which would enable future inquiries to hit the ground running. It would also make them more efficient, more streamlined and less costly to the public.”

The 2005 Act is the main statutory basis for establishing an inquiry into matters of major current concern, with rules setting out the detailed procedure. Until the passage of the Act, inquiries had a wide variety of different statutory bases.

The Act was intended to make public inquiries more effective at finding facts and making practical recommendations, and less costly, whilst still being thorough and wide ranging.

Inquiries set up without any statutory basis have no power to order the production of documents or the attendance of witnesses, or to take evidence on oath. “Public confidence in them is not as high, but still ministers persist in setting them up,” the committee said.

It added that it was not necessarily the case that inquiries set up on a non-statutory basis were quicker and less expensive.

Ashley Underwood QC of Cornerstone Barristers, who gave evidence to the committee, said there was no systematic approach to the decision when to establish a public inquiry and, if so, whether it should be statutory.

“Accordingly, new inquiries should be statutory, unless there is good reason,” he said.

Underwood added: “Ministers should give reasons to Parliament for a decision not to hold an inquiry when invited to do so by a regulatory body or where an investigation by a regulatory body has been widely criticised.
 
“There is no use made of the expertise gathered by individual solicitors and secretaries to inquiries. A new unit should be established to take responsibility for setting up inquiries, for ensuring that lessons are learned, that guidance is updated, that protocols are shared and that experience is pooled.”

Underwood also called for new inquiries to be subjected to a scoping exercise, and the 2005 Act and the Inquiry Rules to be revised “to give the chairmen more autonomy over the processes to be followed”.