Public inquiries are all the rage right now – whether to hold one, whether they work, whether they’re cynical political cover or honest efforts at consensus building. First, the opposition, fuelled by the Twitter supremo Elon Musk’s current unnerving interest in Britain, has been demanding an inquiry into grooming gangs. The government is denying the request on the grounds that there has already been a perfectly good inquiry – the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, led by Alexis Jay, which was published in October 2022 and whose recommendations the Tories failed to implement before leaving office.
Fair enough. This story makes a fascinating contrast, though, with the government’s plan, unveiled last weekend, to create an independent commission to enquire into Britain’s broken social care system and how to fix them. Here, too, this would be a repeat of previous process, the 2010-11 Dilnot Commission; but this time it’s the government that thinks there’s value to be found in asking the same questions again.
A cynic might suggest we already know how to fix the social care system – have known for years – we just don’t know how to do that without electoral cost. Ministers hope, presumably, that an inquiry will provide a combination of national consensus and political cover, but it’s not clear it’ll work. The proposed inquiry will report 2028, unnervingly close to the next election, when consensus will be in short supply. The Tories have already attacked Labour for its lack of action.
There’s an irony, then, in the fact that inquiries themselves seem to be recurring at a prodigious rate. Data from the Institute for Government suggests that the last year on which no public inquiries was taking place was 1990, the one Margaret Thatcher left Downing Street. Their use ballooned under New Labour, and by 2012 a dozen were running at once. Today, there are 17.
And all these mechanisms can also sometimes be used by our leaders to create an impression of action without incurring a need to take any difficult decisions. (No one ever lost an election by announcing an enquiry.) They do not, after all, automatically lead to real changes: recommendations are made, but there is no legal mechanism to ensure they are ever implemented. And both inquiries and commissions tend to take quite some time to report – because other legal proceedings delay matters; because the issues being examined are extremely complicated. Not unrelated to that, both can cost a fortune. More than £200m was spent, in 2017 prices, on the Bloody Sunday Inquiry alone.
The main weakness of public inquiries, argues IfG deputy director Emma Norris, is that “most of responsibility for ensuring recommendations happen sits with the survivors and victims,” and their ability to pressure politicians through media coverage. “It shouldn’t all be down to them.” The IfG and campaigners alike have called for a National Oversight Mechanism, a state body akin to the National Audit Office, responsible for collating recommendations and monitoring their implementation.
Decisions over matters like funding social care, by contrast, are still ultimately in the hands of ministers. “No commission can help sidestep that really difficult political choice.” Try as they might, however, to remove controversial issues from the arena of day to day politics.
A process that brings evidence and independent expertise rightly has a place in government. But the apparently contrasting attitudes of different parties of government to different enquiries is a reminder that this isn’t the same as removing politics from an issue altogether. These independent processes can gather facts or make recommendations – but it is still the job of ministers to act on their findings. To enquire is not to govern. At times, it can be the opposite.
[See also: Why Farage is turning left]
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