How should we handle historic public inquiries?
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 30 October 2025
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When a disaster or serious event happens, such as the Grenfell Tower fire, the Manchester Arena terrorist attack or the Covid pandemic, you can be pretty sure that a public inquiry will follow. They’re popular with the public as a means of investigating serious state failure. And for Governments they can be a good way of kicking a difficult issue into the long grass, as usually by the time the inquiry is finished a different set of politicians will have to deal with the report.
There are currently 25 public inquiries in progress in the UK today - the most ever, with six announced so far this year. They range from one into Scottish child abuse, which is the longest current inquiry, to another into a police restraint death which has just lost its chair and the lawyers working for the inquiry, to Covid 19 - the largest currently underway. And which by the end of June this year had cost 177 million pounds. David Aaronovitch and guests discuss how these public inquiries work, what they achieve and who, if anyone, benefits from them?
Guests:
Judith Moritz: BBC Special Correspondent Deborah Coles, Executive Director, INQUEST Emma Norris, Director of Policy and Politics at IPPR think tank, Professor Lucy Easthope, emergency planner and responder and visiting Professor at the Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath.
Presenter: David Aaronovitch Producers: Caroline Bayley, Kirsteen Knight, Cordelia Hemming. Sound engineer: Duncan Hannant Editor: Richard Vadon.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:09.9 | Guess how many public inquiries are currently underway in the UK? |
| 0:15.9 | 25. The most ever and six have been announced so far in 2025. |
| 0:22.2 | They're often lengthy, sometimes lasting several years, expensive. |
| 0:26.4 | The COVID inquiry had cost north of 175 million pounds by this summer and contentious. |
| 0:33.0 | And yet it sometimes seems everybody wants one. |
| 0:36.8 | Right now, it's the problems with the grooming gang's inquiry that's hitting the headlines. |
| 0:41.4 | But the questions that it and the fashion for inquiries raise are whether we hold the right kinds of inquiries for the right reasons |
| 0:48.5 | and whether there might be a better way of doing things. |
| 0:52.3 | Step into the briefing room and together we'll find out. |
| 1:00.1 | We'll start with the grooming gang's inquiry as our most recent example. |
| 1:04.1 | The briefing room's Caroline Bailey spoke to the BBC's special correspondent Judith Moritz, |
| 1:08.9 | who's been following the grooming gang story since 2012 |
| 1:11.5 | and asked her why the inquiry is happening now two decades on. |
| 1:16.7 | There have been inquiries before relating to grooming. |
| 1:20.3 | You remember perhaps the local approach taken to the inquiry in Rotherham, |
| 1:24.5 | which was chaired by Professor Alexis J in 2014. And then at the other end |
| 1:29.9 | of the scale, also chaired by Alexis J, the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, ICSA, |
| 1:35.8 | which ran for seven years. That was an enormous inquiry. But it's widely held that neither |
| 1:42.4 | of those models of inquiry, either the local kind or the very much larger ICSA, dealt with laser focus on the subject of group-based child sexual exploitation, grooming gangs, in other words, on a national footing. |
| 1:57.0 | And there's been a call for that over many years, but specifically this year, just to |
| 2:02.3 | fast forward, and this really is in short order. You'll remember the political ping pong at the |
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