What are public inquiries and how many are ongoing?
The announcement of this inquiry brings the total number of ongoing public inquiries to 23, more than at any time before.
Concerns have been raised by members of the public, as well as MPs and ministers, over the ever-growing number, cost and length of time they take to complete their work.
So what do public inquiries achieve, and, after this latest announcement, is the government too quick to push the inquiry button?
What is a public inquiry?
Public inquiries are set up by government ministers and aim to investigate "events of major public concern or to consider controversial public policy issues."
There are two types of public inquiry, statutory and non-statutory.
Statutory inquiries in the UK are launched under the Inquiries Act 2005 and have legal powers to compel evidence and witness testimony.
Typically, they are used for serious matters of public concern and are often led by judges.
Non-statutory inquiries have no legal powers and rely on voluntary cooperation. They are faster and more flexible, but can be less effective if key witnesses refuse to take part.
Through the analysis of documents, as well as evidence and testimony from relevant parties, inquiries seek to establish a legal record of what happened, who bears responsibility and what recommendations can be made to prevent something similar from happening in the future.
Do we need them?
There are often widespread calls for public inquiries in the wake of serious events. Many see them as a vital tool in seeking answers and bringing all responsible parties together in one investigation.
Responding to calls to reform the system, the government claimed recent public inquiries have been "considered to be an independent, legitimate and trusted method of investigating complex issues of deep public concern.
"They have shown to be a way to shed light on injustices of the past, provide a means for victims and survivors to finally have their voices heard, and to help rebuild trust in national institutions."
But cabinet minister Nick Thomas-Symonds acknowledged "there is serious and growing criticism of their cost, duration, and effectiveness."
The government claims that, in the financial year 2023/24, the cost to the public of ongoing inquiries totalled more than £130 million.
Statutory inquiries that produced their final report in the last five years took, on average, nearly five years to do so.
How many public inquiries are there?
With the announcement of the public inquiry into the Battle of Ogreave, the UK now has 23 ongoing statutory inquiries, including the Infected Blood Inquiry.
According to the Institute for Government (IfG), since 1997, there have never been fewer than five public inquiries running at any one time.
Three of the 23 - the Orgreave Inquiry, the Independent Commission on Grooming Gangs and the Finucane Inquiry - have been announced, but are yet to begin.
The IfG claims that between 1990 and 2025, 90 public inquiries have been launched – compared with only 19 in the 30 years prior.
Whilst public inquiries vary greatly in length, the shortest ever recorded was less than a year.
The Hammond Inquiry ran from September 2006 to June 2007, investigating allegations of corruption by Peter Mandelson over the handling of two foreign brothers' UK passport applications.
Currently, the longest recorded inquiry was into Hyponatraemia-related deaths, which took over 13 years to complete.
Could things change?
In 2014, the House of Lords reviewed the public inquiry process and made 33 recommendations to reform it.
The coalition Conservative and Liberal-Democrat government at the time accepted 19 of these, but failed to implement a single one.
Reporting again in 2024, the Lords' Statutory Inquiry Committee reiterated many of these recommendations but disagreed with the 2014 suggestion that all new inquiries should be established as statutory.
It concluded there were several benefits to non-statutory inquiries, particularly the ability for victims to address the chair directly, rather than through legal counsel as required by statute.
The current government has accepted the latest report's findings and agreed that the inquiry process needs to be improved.
It confirmed its intention is 'to build on this important work with a wider review of the policy and operational framework around public inquiries,' promising a further update to parliament in due course.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mirror
17 hours ago
- Daily Mirror
NICK THOMAS-SYMONDS: 'We can't allow the historic fires powering our steel industry to go out'
EU Relations Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds said a deal with the EU 'will save the UK steel industry millions' by smoothing Brexit barriers and making it easier to export goods Few jobs are harder than working in a steel mill. But the physical, intense work builds resilience and pride in our historic steelworker communities. My Dad worked in Llanwern Steelworks when I was growing up in South Wales. I remember feeling a sense of awe when I went there as a child and understood what he did every working day. Growing up, I felt the pride he took in his work. The UK has a proud history of steelmaking. But its future hasn't always been clear. International over-production of steel and a spike in energy costs have created a difficult trading situation for British companies. Prices for steel have dropped just as the costs of making it have gone up. And the industry has been threatened by tariffs too. But thanks to the new relationship this government has built with the EU, tariff-free access to their market for our construction-grade steel to traditional trade levels has been restored. This will save the UK steel industry millions. We cannot allow the historic fires that power our steel industry to go out. It is a 37,000- worker strong sector, supporting thousands of families in towns across the UK. And we have made a choice to put communities across the UK first. You can see it with our Industrial Strategy and in our international negotiations. 'International negotiations' can sound distant. Something done far away that isn't always easy to explain. It can be hard to work out the tangible impacts on people's lives. But this shows it; they can save industries millions. They protect jobs. As Minister for EU Relations, I want to strike a new relationship with our largest trading partner, one built around trust and cooperation. To get rid of the approach that the Tories and Nigel Farage want to take - adversarial, fuelled by suspicion and ideology. It led to a weaker trading relationship. It risked British industry at home. They still want to reverse the deal. Putting their parties over the interest of the country. There's no denying the strength of British steel, forged over generations in Scunthorpe, the mills near my constituency in Port Talbot and many other towns and cities. Through our new pragmatic working relationship with the EU, we have provided a vital boost to this critical UK industry.
The Herald Scotland
a day ago
- The Herald Scotland
We should learn a lesson from America's can-do attitude
But rather than looking at the alleged injustices of one high-profile incident, as the Orgreave Inquiry will do, it is surely just as important to explore the wider social and economic injustices inflicted by the decline of mining and other traditional industries. The most recent State of the Coalfields report from Sheffield University, which explores the condition of former mining communities across the UK, concludes that in Scotland these areas 'still display acute social and economic disadvantage'. It is something which Westminster's Scottish Affairs Committee has also touched on in its inquiry into industrial transition across Scotland. Read More: All of which underlines the necessity of sustainable reindustrialisation, the kind which rather than delivering here today-gone tomorrow employment, instead brings good jobs, skilled work and properly rewarding pay. These things should not be too much to expect. But for those who have fallen through the cracks in society in the years since the decline of older heavy industry, it has often felt that way. Now, with Scotland and the rest of the UK well placed to drive forward the industries of the future, a new era of opportunity is before us. That is why I'm delighted that we are on the verge of securing no fewer than 1,200 jobs for Ayrshire, in a development that promises to lock in growth, opportunity and community wealth for the long term. The UK-based undersea cable manufacturer XLCC is poised to deliver 900 manufacturing-related jobs at Hunterston, making the area a key hub for European and global development of technology which will help power the next generation of renewable energy projects at home and abroad. With global demand for high voltage direct current (HVDC) subsea cables rapidly outpacing supply, the company aims to build the world's biggest and most advanced HVDC manufacturing facility here in Scotland. It is hard to overstate the importance and significance of this project. For years we have been told that Scotland, with its huge green energy potential, is on the verge of a new industrial revolution which can provide the jobs and energy security we so badly need. Too often however, it has felt like we have been waiting and waiting for that long-heralded promise to become a reality. That is why the XLCC project is so vital, and so exciting. In addition to the jobs at Hunterston, 300 additional jobs are expected to be created in Kilmarnock , with the multi-award winning HALO enterprise and low carbon innovation centre identified as the preferred location. I have developed HALO over many years in the 28-acre site of the former Johnnie Walker bottling plant in the town. These posts, including project delivery and sales teams, will drive and support the manufacturing facility at Hunterston. The XLCC development has been in the pipeline since 2020, and like HALO will only be delivered through partnership between the private sector, unions, local authorities and both the Scottish and UK Governments, all working at pace to ensure this massive opportunity is secured. There are two other points worth making in relation to this promised jobs windfall for Ayrshire. Firstly, I would urge both the Scottish and UK Governments to do more to speed up the pace of investment in regeneration and reindustrialisation, including the easing of planning laws to make such development easier. Checks and balances, along with due process, are important when it comes to planning. But too often we are forced to wait too long to turn potential into reality. And delays are one reason we see valuable jobs going to other countries instead of being created here. That links directly to the second point, which is just how important it is for the manufacturing bases for the industries that will power the rest of this century to be based in this country. Scotland may have an abundance of natural resources when it comes to our energy potential. We are blessed with huge advantages when to green power, in addition to the oil and gas which is still an important part of our energy mix. But that only counts for so much if the infrastructure and industrial gain required to exploit those resources is outsourced to other nations. The arrival of XLCC in Scotland will be a powerful counter to the notion that we have to look elsewhere for energy manufacturing. And, as Scotland and [[Ayr]]shire witnessed during the visit of US President Donald Trump, we could do worse than take a leaf from the playbook of America's can-do attitude to business, enterprise and opportunity. We have the resources, and we have the skill – we just need the political will to ensure potential becomes reality. Dr Marie Macklin CBE is a leading Scottish businesswoman and investor.
Times
3 days ago
- Times
Orgreave inquiry serves no one but Labour
In the early 1980s Arthur Scargill became president of the National Union of Mineworkers and set out to bring down the elected government through a campaign of industrial confrontation. The bulk of Britain's miners decided to back him. And Margaret Thatcher was determined to stop him. Let's have an inquiry into all of that. Last week the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, announced an inquiry into the so-called Battle of Orgreave that she has been advocating for more than ten years. Some people have argued this is pointless, and an odd priority for a government with so many other challenges. Well yes, but I think it is worse than that. • Orgreave inquiry into miners' strike clashes to begin in autumn On June 18, 1984, somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 pickets assembled outside the British Steel coking works in Orgreave, South Yorkshire. It was the climactic moment of the miners' strike that both Scargill and Thatcher had long been preparing for. The aim of the NUM was to stop lorries moving coke from the plant, but the pickets failed. Their challenge was met by something like 5,000 police officers and the confrontation became violent. Exactly why that happened is what the inquiry will seek to establish. There is no question that many officers were violent and overstepped professional boundaries, and that afterwards there was quite a lot of official lying, covering up and fabricating evidence. All of this is quite well known, since the prosecutions of the arrested miners collapsed due to the unreliable evidence, and a number of them received compensation in an out-of-court settlement. The Orgreave inquiry will certainly tell of scandalous behaviour and find plenty that it will wish to criticise. This does not make the inquiry a neutral investigation of the truth. It is, instead, a nakedly political exercise which will be led by someone — the Bishop of Sheffield — who has been campaigning on the issue for many years. What is taking place is an attempt to re-litigate the rights and wrongs of the miners' strike, using the evidence and grievances of only one of the parties involved. Having lost the political argument over the strike at the time, the left has sought to rewrite the history of that disastrous dispute, and Orgreave is their weapon. The idea they are advancing is that the strike was somehow thrust upon the miners against their will, a class provocation by the establishment designed to crush working-class spirit. The Orgreave inquiry will seek to portray the dispute's violence as being originated by the police, with the miners as victims. This narrative must be vigorously resisted. What happened that day wasn't the whole of the miners' strike. The so-called Battle of Orgreave wasn't even the only encounter in Orgreave. On May 29, less than three weeks before the famous battle, mass pickets threw darts and bricks at the police and dozens of people were injured. The miners' strike of 1984 was thrust on to the rest of us by the miners, not by us on to them. It was the NUM who decided to try to bring the UK economy and broader society to its knees, pursuing an economic demand that was utterly ridiculous. The insistence that we continue mining coal whatever its economic viability could not possibly be yielded to by any government. And Scargill did not even really mean it to be yielded to, since his intention was actually to depose the government. The miners gathered in large and deliberately intimidating numbers in order to use their physical presence to prevent other people from going to work. They sought to collapse the economy, destroying the livelihoods of millions of people. They made their particular target those miners who went to work, treating them as traitors in the class struggle — even though Scargill hadn't had the decency to hold a proper strike ballot. All of this was a repeated and violent act, which they intended to continue until we all agreed to do whatever they wanted. Margaret Thatcher and her government determined that this would not be allowed to happen. The police undoubtedly overstepped the mark quite seriously on occasion, but they were defending the freedom of all of us to elect our own government, decide our energy policy, keep the lights and heating on and go about our lawful business as workers and customers. If the police had lost at Orgreave and elsewhere, the losers would have been all of us, and the consequences economically and for the rule of law would have been disastrous. The great irony of the Orgreave inquiry is that it comes about through an appeal to an elected home secretary and relying on the strong sense of the rest of us that justice and the law be upheld, when in fact the strike was an assault on all these things — elected governments, law and justice. That is the actual story of the miners' strike and if Yvette Cooper really feels it is worthwhile, we can have an inquiry into all of that. Let me explain why I think this matters. Liberal democracies must have the self-confidence to defend themselves and to insist that political disputes are settled politically. The moment one group shows it can get its way by violence or threat of violence, everyone will start to do it. People must be free to protest, but using your body to prevent someone going about their lawful business cannot be accepted as a way to win an argument. Take the protests outside migrant accommodation. I have been arguing for much of the past 20 years against rapid mass migration and against the many failures of our asylum system that the disastrous migrant hotels manifest. Protest is inevitable and the reason for it obvious. However, the arrival at these protests of far-right groups and violent individuals, threatening the safety of those inside the hotels and attacking police officers, needs to be met with a vigorous response. Liberal democracies need to police their borders and prevent illegal migration, but they also cannot allow vigilante justice and physical menace to determine asylum policy. The Home Office has rightly formed an investigations unit, with police officers providing intelligence on the protests gathered from social media. Yet this was attacked by Nigel Farage as 'sinister' and by Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, as turning Britain into a 'surveillance state'. An outrageous position. This is not the moment for the home secretary to round on the police and place herself on the side of violent protest, even if that protest was more than 40 years ago. The idea she is pursuing facts to right an ancient injustice is one I completely reject. It is partial truth and sectional justice she is after, in the political interests of the Labour Party.
