Hansard Society

• The Assisted Dying Bill: A guide to the Private Member's Bill process

• The Assisted Dying Bill: Making sense of the parliamentary process

House of Lords Statutory Inquiries Committee

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

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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.