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

Lord Addington Excerpts

Friday 25th April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Norton, for chairing the committee. I was one of its members who did not have a legal background, and I was not made to feel too much like I was running to keep up the whole time. It was an interesting process, because we looked at something for which agreement was established pretty early on: that the committee itself might have been a moment in the process of solving something, but action after it had reported was the important thing. If we lost sight of that, there was absolutely no point in meeting in the first place.

The way to do this—we spent a great deal of time looking at this; I will not repeat words that have already been said or are presented in the report—was as efficiently as possible and to pay attention to the lessons learned before. We also had a very interesting discussion about the most appropriate ways of getting at the truth—ones that we should all pay attention to. The fact that distinguished lawyers said, “It’s not always the way lawyers traditionally do it that is important”, is something that everybody should listen to.

When an organisation criticises itself and its brethren, pay attention. Organisations know their own faults, even if they do not admit them very often. The same is true about making sure that something happens here. This has to be something that affects Parliament. A committee of both Houses would be best because, at the start of a Government, the Government may feel that they have all the time in the world, but they will not do so in three years’ time.

We also have a huge backlog of things to go through. If the Government are going to be brave, as we understand they will be, we must get down something that states what the priorities are and what is standing. The first phase will be the most difficult because there is a huge backlog of recommendations to bring into law. It may only be smaller adaptations to bits of law going through and an emphasis going down—we have all played this game long enough to know that—but it is about how you get a structure that says you are addressing things. Indeed, it is about looking back and saying, “We’ve subsequently covered this”; proving it and going through are important.

Those things will happen only if the Government are under pressure from Parliament to make sure that they are happening. We all know that all Governments have their own wonderful schemes they have thought out and that, really, nothing should get in the way. In effect, that is saying, “Things have gone wrong”, and correcting on the way through. By the way, in my experience, no one party is removed from this process. They all have a series of priorities. This is a break to say, “No matter what your priorities are, something has gone wrong. We’ve got to address this now”. I hope that, when the Government respond, they will bear that in mind. It is not an easy thing to do; if the Government are going to do something about it, I salute their bravery, because they have to do it.

This will not happen if we continue to kick it into the long grass. The noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, who does not seem to be in her place, gave us a good example of the long-grass punt that is going on. If we are to get away from that, including structurally, we need from the Government undertakings that once again refer back to this monitoring committee that will come about. The noble Lord, Lord Bichard, came up with another way of doing it, but it is still the same thing; it is still the same input into Parliament to say that we will not go back to that way of saying, “Well, we’ve done something, but it will be somebody else who has to deal with it—and who knows what will be happening by then?”. That is clearly the underlying message around what has happened, or has in effect ended up happening, in the past.

I hope that the Government would have no objections to some of the things about gathering good information on how you run a committee. It was sometimes the case that people sat there and said, “You mean you don’t do this? You mean you disregard what others have done?”. I had never been through this before. People were nodding and saying, “Yeah, this is how it happens. I thought it was ridiculous that we weren’t doing that”. I hope we can have a happy “yes” on that.

I could go on, but I would end up repeating myself. We must make sure that the process of a public inquiry is something that leads to action. We must make sure that the recommendation about time becomes very important in that process; and that the interim reports, which are a spur to action, are also used. If we do those things, we can give a bit of faith back to the process whereby we look at real problems and come up with solutions that we in Parliament have identified.