Chilcot Inquiry

Lord Hurd of Westwell Excerpts

Tuesday 6th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we all regret the delay, but I wish to stress that this is not unusual for inquiries of this sort. I know that we were all looking at the al-Sweady inquiry as part of our Christmas reading. That took five years to report on two battles in one afternoon and cost £24 million. The Baha Mousa inquiry, looking into the death in UK custody of one Iraqi civilian in September 2003, took three years and cost £13.5 million. This inquiry has been looking at nine years of British policy and operations within Iraq. It is not entirely unexpected, therefore, that it has turned out to take a long time.

[Lord Hurd of Westwell (Con)]

Does the Minister agree that my noble friend’s point is at the heart of this whole matter? This has dragged on beyond the questions of mere negligence and forgivable delay; it is becoming a scandal. This is not a matter of trivial importance; it is something to which a large number of people in this country look anxiously for the truth. Is it not time that the Government exerted themselves to make sure that that reasonable demand is met?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we all regret the amount of time that has been taken. I think in retrospect, as an outside observer, that it might have been a good thing to have recruited a larger staff at the beginning of the inquiry, because the sheer volume of the documentation that the inquiry found itself looking through was much greater than had originally been anticipated. It is, however, an independent inquiry. The Government will receive the report. The one decision that the Government will then take is when it will be published. It is up to the chairman of an independent inquiry to decide when and how it completes its report.