The new politics of public inquiries

This article argues that it is possible to identify a ‘new’ politics of public inquiries. A sizable seam of scholarship and parliamentary discussion has for at least a century bemoaned the limited independence of public inquiries. The ‘old’ politics of public inquiries has traditionally been defined by a largely internalised and administrative focus on the capacity of ministers to control the terms of reference, appoint the chair, control the resource framework, deflect findings and ignore recommendations, etc. The great value of the September 2024 report by the Statutory Inquiries Committee in the House of Lords is that a bridge can be seen to be built between the ‘old’ politics of public inquiries and a ‘new’ politics which emphasises ‘range and variation’ in the design of inquiry processes, and defines social healing and collective catharsis as core inquiry functions alongside the traditional roles of blame allocation and policy learning.