Public Inquiries: Enchancing Public Trust (Statutory Inquiries Committee Report)

Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone Excerpts

Friday 25th April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone (Con)]

My Lords, I agree with all those who have warmly commended the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, and of Hull University, for his characteristically rigorous, accessible, practical report, and the other members of the committee.

The noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, said that in this place we are allowed to draw on our experience, knowledge and expertise, so, I thought I would. When I became a Minister, having a public inquiry was thought to be cowardly—kicking it into the long grass and creating trouble for your successors; you were not going to do anything about it, so “Let’s have an inquiry and forget about it”. Looking at the figures—the Institute for Government, of which I am a great fan, has a wonderful chart—we see that when I was a Secretary of State, there were two public inquiries in government at that time; there are now around 20. The big offenders were in the years 2000 and 2010. I am afraid that when Tony Blair was Prime Minister, there were 15, and when Gordon Brown was Prime Minister, there were 16—I do not wish to be politically partisan; I am simply making a comment.

My experience, having been to any number of child abuse inquiries before I was a Member of Parliament, was that they always said the same thing. Louis Blom-Cooper was my great friend; I am sorry that the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, is not here. The situation was always that nobody wanted to believe the unbelievable, so the child had fallen between the cracks, nobody had picked up the bruises and nobody had recognised that the child was never seen at school or at home. There was nothing new; it was always the same; we had been through all the misery in the court and then had to go through it all in an inquiry.

What professional is really going to spill the beans in a public inquiry? If you have an inquiry in private, they are much more likely to explain why they did not follow up, what went wrong that day and what the institutional issues were. Of course, judges know nothing about these matters. That is why I support those who think you should have an expert. Louis Blom-Cooper, although a judge, was an expert in the subject.

In my case, there was a subject which was new—Christopher Clunis murdered Jonathan Zito; he was a psychiatric patient and, as with the child abuse story, nobody had followed up; he was okay in hospital and okay when he came out, but not okay when he stopped taking his medication. To me, this was an issue which we had to really ram home and reinforce to people. Since that very good inquiry—a QC, Jean Ritchie, did a very good job; I am not against lawyers on all occasions—we have had any number of inquiries on the same subject. We do not need to have the same inquiry time and again.

When it came to Beverley Allitt, the nurse who was murdering patients, I asked Sir Cecil Clothier, a QC and former health service ombudsman, to have an inquiry in private. He did it in nine months and the recommendations were excellent. We do not need to have a judge-led inquiry for Lucy Letby—there is very little new there; we have had a court case—but the key point that my noble friend Lord Norton makes is that there was no follow-up. When people talk to me about Lucy Letby, they ask, “What happened to your recommendations?” I say, “I don’t know”, because I had moved on.

The chair of an inquiry is critical—this is a serious point—and I am so pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, is going to speak shortly. He is not a QC, I understand, or a distinguished judge. He did a brilliant report on Soham, as have so many others. Currently, Sir Jonathan Michael, a very distinguished doctor who was chief executive of Saint Thomas’ and of the Radcliffe, is investigating David Fuller and the appalling Tunbridge Wells and Maidstone hospital cases. Our colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Lampard, has done some extremely good inquiries. So let us get a chair who knows what they are doing, and not fourth time lucky as in the ridiculous child sex abuse case, which should be used as an example of bad practice—who wants a QC from New Zealand to do this?—and not like the Infected Blood Inquiry, where we should have had a panel with people on it who actually knew about health. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Phillips, had a geneticist and a public servant with him.

I know that cannot speak any longer, although I really want to. I commend the report. There is so much more to say—please, can we have a longer debate next time?