Should Parliament, rather than Ministers, oversee public inquiries?

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Should Parliament, rather than Ministers, oversee public inquiries? - Parliament Matters podcast, Episode 67

17 Jan 2025

With the Government still under pressure to set up an independent inquiry into child grooming gangs should Parliament have a role in setting up inquiries into state failures and national disasters? Currently, Ministers take crucial decisions about who should chair an inquiry and what its precise remit should be. But a House of Lords Committee last year proposed giving Parliament a greater say and adopting a more systematic approach to implementing inquiry recommendations.

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Next week, Ministers will move the money resolution for the Assisted Dying Bill. This crucial procedural step will pave the way for the Bill’s next stage in a Public Bill Committee. Will Ministers face tough questions about how much they expect the proposed assisted dying system to cost during the 45-minute debate?

In other news, there’s been a spectacular promotion for former policy wonk and government adviser Torsten Bell, in the wake of the resignation of Treasury Minister Tulip Siddiq. Only elected last July, he’s just been made Pensions Minister, but will he be haunted by his many pronouncements as a talking head at Commons select committees and in media panel discussions?

Finally, is there still a place in the Commons for Masterpiece Theatre-style pyrotechnics? After Shadow-Chancellor Mel Stride’s attempt to shame Rachel Reeves with some Shakespearean rhetoric bombed in the chamber, Ruth and Mark reflect on whether parliamentary theatricals are now obsolete.

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Resources

Hansard Society

House of Lords Statutory Inquiries Committee

Public inquiries: Enhancing public trust, HL Paper 9, 12 September 2024

Transcript

Please note, this transcript is automatically generated. There may consequently be minor errors and the text is not formatted according to our style guide. If you wish to reference or cite the transcript copy below, please first check against the audio version above.

Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production, supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm..

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. Coming up this week.

Ruth Fox: Public inquiries. They're now a big part of the scrutiny of government. So should Parliament, not ministers, set them up and monitor their work?

Mark D'Arcy: You ring my bell, the rapid rise of policy wonk whizkid Torsten Bell, now Minister for Pensions.

Ruth Fox: And how much room is there in the modern commons for masterclass theatricals?

Mark D'Arcy: But first Ruth, I think before we start, we ought to do a quick community note as it were. We've had a few little technical hitches this week and so [00:01:00] what we're offering is going to be a shorter and possibly slightly less polished version of the pod than usual. But I do hope listeners will bear with us through it, and we hope to be back and firing on all cylinders in next week's edition.

But in the meantime, quite a lot of interesting things going on in Westminster for us to chat about.

Ruth Fox: There are. Yeah, so we talked last week, Mark, um, about the demands at Westminster for public inquiry into what was happening with the grooming gangs in towns across the UK and how politicised that has suddenly become on the back of Elon Musk's social media hits.

And, uh, in fact, as we said, this is not going to go away for Labour. It certainly died down a little bit because there's been a bit more focus this week on the state of the economy and Rachel Reeves' position, but it's not gone away. I mean, this is going to rumble on and on. The Home Secretary Yvette Cooper's um, just announced a series of local inquiries into grooming gangs and, and some Labour MPs, Rotherham's Sarah Champion for example, are saying that's what's needed.

But the question I think Mark is, is whether that will be enough to satisfy [00:02:00] critics elsewhere in Parliament, and indeed outside Parliament, and the media and so on. But it's also opened up this question of who sets the parameters for public inquiries. And a lot of MPs in the last few days have been getting interested in this question.

And of course, there are an awful lot of inquiries for them to get interested in. These things cost an awful lot of money. When tragedy happens, when there are scandals in various organs of the state, there's always calls for a public inquiry. But then shortly thereafter there are criticisms of the public inquiries for how much they cost, how long they go on for, and critically one of the things is what happens with the recommendations.

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