26
Examination of witnesses
Sir John Saunders, Kate Eves and Brian Altman KC.
Q1 The Chair: Good afternoon. Welcome to this afternoon’s session of the committee set up by the House of Lords to inquire into the Inquiries Act 2005. For our first session, we welcome our three distinguished witnesses. For the record, may I invite each of you to introduce yourself?
Sir John Saunders: I was chairman of the Manchester Arena inquiry.
Kate Eves: I was chair of the Brook House inquiry.
Brian Altman KC: I was counsel to the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse. I was lead counsel to the inquiry that Kate chaired, the Brook House inquiry. I am currently lead counsel to the Ministry of Defence in the Afghanistan inquiry.
Q2 The Chair: Thank you very much. We are very grateful to you for being here this afternoon. We will put a number of questions. I will start with the opening question, which is a fairly broad one. I invite you to identify, based on your experience, which provisions of the Inquiries Act 2005 are the most, or the least, helpful in ensuring that a statutory inquiry is efficient and effective. Sir John, may we start with you?
Sir John Saunders: Section 17 is the most useful. That gives discretion to the chairman as to how the inquiry is run. It is useful because no two inquiries are the same. Having that discretion really does help.
The worst ones, as we found from our experience in Manchester, are the enforcement provisions, which are Sections 21, 35 and 36. It all becomes a bit technical but, in volume 3 of our report, there is a section dealing with the problems that they caused us. We had a witness, a brother of Salman Abedi, whom we particularly wanted to hear from and who knew a lot. He was able to leave the country without us being able to stop him because the provisions of Sections 35 and 36 are not sufficiently tight. He has never returned to this country, and he is not showing any signs that he will. It was quite a big loss to the inquiry that we could not have him. Those were the worst ones for me.
Kate Eves: I agree that Section 17, in terms of the discretion, is obviously very important. We, too, had to use Section 21, although we did not have quite the same unfortunate experience as Sir John.
Among the other things that I would urge more broadly is thinking about the warning letter process—rules 13 to 15. I can talk in more detail about that if that would be helpful as we go through. There are also some issues around the setting up of the inquiry. Some of the recommendations that were made in the 2014 report speak to that.
Brian Altman KC: Sir John must have looked over my shoulder at some of the notes I have made. As to the most helpful provision, I, too, had identified Section 17, which gives the chair a wide power—subject to both the need to avoid unnecessary cost and considerations of fairness—to conduct the inquiry in the way they see most fit.
On the least helpful, I agree, particularly regarding Sections 35 and 36. Prosecution after the event is one thing—it is subsection (1) of Section 35—but it is an after-the-event punishment, sanction and process, and is hardly worth it. In the process of enforcing to give evidence somebody who has failed to comply with a Section 21 notice, going to the High Court is cumbersome and clunky. It is very document heavy. We did it. I wonder whether the committee might want to look at that. I know that it is difficult and is not an easy solution. Effecting the efficiency of any inquiry is all about getting witnesses before the inquiry, as and when you want them, with the least possible fuss.
I wonder why we cannot look at the sort of system that we have in the criminal courts of summons and, if somebody refuses to attend, getting a policeman to arrest them and bring them before the inquiry. It is much quicker and much smoother and involves less fuss.
The Chair: Thank you very much to all three of you for that. We now have various other questions.
Q3 Lord Aberdare: Mine is another broad question. Which of the 33 conclusions and recommendations of the House of Lords 2014 report on the Act are still relevant and important? Are there any conclusions and recommendations from the report that you disagree with or think should be updated? I hope that, again, you will be more focused in your responses than going through the entire gamut.
Sir John Saunders: In general terms, I think that they are all pretty relevant. Kate has already mentioned recommendation 25, which is to do with warning letters. I would also like to say something about warning letters at some stage.
Our experience was that, although the procedure may be cumbersome, and it may be that it can be trimmed or made more discretionary, we found it really useful. The amount of information that we had when doing our report was huge. There was a vast amount of evidence and material. By setting out the criticisms, we got some quite useful information back, some of which we might have missed had we not had that procedure. Although I am aware that it delays things, we found it useful.
I would also like to mention the recommendation in relation to monitoring recommendations. Kate and I disagree fairly fundamentally with the way the committee gets to that. We can perhaps talk about our own experiences with recommendations, how they have been processed and how that can be improved. It has been worrying quite a lot of people for quite a long time how many of the same things happen all over again. Those are the two that I would like to speak about.
Kate Eves: I agree. The warning letter process undoubtedly lengthens the period of time ahead of publication and, therefore, the expense. My fear is that tinkering with that too much would risk there being challenge to an inquiry’s findings at the very worst stage, once you have reported. Although, in our experience in many cases, we had recipients of warning letters simply seeking to rehearse their evidence in slightly different ways or to introduce things, that was not helpful in the majority of cases. I also agree that we did have information and that, when we were looking at several incidents from several different perspectives, it was an important part of the process to have that.
Again, we agree on the point about the ability to follow up on the response to recommendations and implementation. One of the things that strikes me when reading the 2014 report is the lack of efficiency resulting from reinventing the same wheel time and again. I would go slightly further: where the committee recommended a potential Cabinet Office unit to look at it, there might be some merit in considering whether the sponsoring of inquiries could fall within that unit as well. Obviously, there are issues where a Whitehall department is both a sponsor and a key core participant. Perception-wise, at the very least, that can be difficult.
Lord Aberdare: That is very helpful; thank you.
Brian Altman KC: I looked at recommendation 25 in particular, which deals with Rules 13 to 15 of the Inquiry Rules 2006. The committee’s recommendation at the time was the revocation of those rules, to be substituted by one simple rule. I have looked at that, and I have looked again at Rules 13 to 15. However cumbersome they appear to be, they do have an important part to play not only in identifying when a warning letter might be sent by the chair to a particular individual but also the information that needs to be sent to the individual so that the individual can properly respond to the explicit or significant criticism that is to appear in the report. If you oversimplify the rule, if I may say so, the opportunity for an individual to respond adequately and, as Sir John said, open the chair’s eyes to the possibility that they might have got something wrong or misunderstood the evidence, is something that ought not to be entertained. The rules, however difficult they appear to be, have a proper part to play in the warning letter process in order that everybody understands what the criticism is and what the proper response to be made to it is.
The only other recommendation that caught my eye was in relation to recommendation 27, where the committee recommended that Rule 9 should be amended to allow the inquiry’s own legal team to take written statements from witnesses. Looking again at Rule 9, it is wide enough to allow an inquiry to do whatever it wishes to do. All Rule 9 says is that a recipient of a Rule 9 request for evidence must be sent that request. How the inquiry goes about taking the evidence—whether it is from the individual’s solicitor, whether the individual provides a home-made witness statement or whether the inquiry legal team, if it is able to do so, goes out to take those statements—is all possible under Rule 9 as it is currently crafted.
Lord Aberdare: I have a brief supplementary question on recommendation 7, which says that the inquiry panel should consist of a single member unless there are strong arguments to the contrary. Do any of you have views on the advantages or disadvantages of not having a single-member inquiry and having more than one member on a panel?
Sir John Saunders: I have only done it on my own. Whether that is satisfactory is not for me to judge. If you have assessors who are experts, the difficulty is that they have to be treated in the same way as witnesses. You are probably better off with them as witnesses in that way, otherwise people do not know what their views are or have a chance to ask questions of them. There may of course be occasions that require someone to help explain the evidence to the chairman, such as if there is something very scientific. I can imagine that. It depends on the inquiry.
Kate Eves: I absolutely agree. Because I am non-judicial, there were suggestions to have a panel that consisted of somebody with legal expertise. Some core participants certainly held that view. It is for others to judge the merits or otherwise.
Brian Altman KC: I have experience of a panel of four, as lead counsel to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. Professor Jay was the chair after there had been, as the committee may know, certain hiccups with chairs in that inquiry. When the music stopped, Alexis Jay became the chair. She had three other panel members, but they were not assessors. But they all had their own areas of expertise in various fields, which I think enhanced her ability to chair that particular inquiry and all the different investigations that it embarked on. I thought that it was helpful.
The only particular problem that arose, or that I foresaw might be an issue, was this: because the panel was four in number, if there were any votes to be had about which way the inquiry should go, an even number inevitably would not be overly helpful. But we did not really get into those sorts of problems.
Sir John Saunders: Brian mentioned Rule 9. Do you mind if I add something to that? It comes from one of my team, with whom I have talked about this hearing. Rule 9 is specific about taking statements. In one case, because somebody would not make a statement, we had to do an interview. He would not sign it or anything, so we just had an interview. We thought that Rule 9 was broad enough to cover that but, if someone is going to look at Rule 9, it might be best to spell it out.
Q4 Baroness Berridge: I declare an interest: I gave evidence to the independent inquiry on child sexual abuse. I was in the Department for Education during Covid so I might be doing a repeat performance. Since the publication of the 2014 report that you have answered questions on, how has the use and operation of the 2005 Act changed?
Sir John Saunders: Brian will know better than me. I did not know anything before that but my team suggested that it has not changed much at all.
Brian Altman KC: I have been doing public inquiry work only since the beginning of 2017, so I am a fairly new boy in that field as well. I tend to agree with John. I have not been told by anybody that practice in relation to the Inquiries Act has changed remarkably.
Baroness Berridge: Can I ask you a follow-up question on that point? You have mentioned the amount of data. Over the period from 2005 to 2014, we obviously saw a lot more digitisation. Has there been receipt of more data? There is apparently data dumping—a colloquialism—going on from government departments into your inquiries. Has that changed during that period and led to complexity at all?
Brian Altman KC: Inevitably, as digitisation increases—not only in government but in all walks of life, in all organisations and institutions—inquiries necessarily find themselves completely overborne by not just tens or hundreds of documents but hundreds of thousands of documents, each necessarily being multi-paged. I am struggling to remember the number that we had in IICSA, the child sexual abuse inquiry. The documentation ran into millions. That inquiry was established in 2015, so not very long after your last report. It will not get better.
Kate Eves: This is not specifically about the application of the Act but about the way the whole world evolved. We got our office space a week before the first lockdown. There was a need to adapt and to interpret the Act and the rules in an environment where you obviously could not hold a public inquiry in public. The ways I felt I needed to think about how to involve participants and make it possible for people to engage remotely in those kinds of things were not, I would anticipate, considerations when the Act was drafted. Although it is not necessarily about the nuts and bolts of the legislation, the things that I, as chair, had to think through were not things that previous inquiry chairs necessarily had to think through. That was just the reality.
Q5 Lord Grantchester: Good afternoon. I tend to think that the approach in the UK is often necessarily adversarial because of the overdependence on lawyers. You might want to compare it to overseas, or not, but does the fact that we have the Act and the rules lead to an overpreponderance of the adversarial approach rather than an inquisitorial approach? Should there be a balance? Does that balance change over the processes of an inquiry, where core participants—victims or others—may need a slightly gentler touch than the adversarial touch? Could it be interpreted in that way? Does the effect of participants being “lawyered up”, if you will excuse the expression, lead to an overpreponderance of the adversarial approach? Your thoughts would be very much welcomed.
Sir John Saunders: It is very much down to the chair. It is inevitable that it will be a mix. I do not see how you can avoid that. Counsel to the inquiry should certainly be inquisitorial, one would hope, but obviously there are difficult questions to ask as well.
When you are dealing with victims who felt very strongly that some people had behaved very badly, as in my inquiries, it was almost inevitable that their counsel was going to be quite adversarial. Indeed, the families would not have been happy had that not happened. If anyone was going to ask a question about the qualities of a chairman, one of them has to be to try to create an atmosphere within the hearing—this is facile in a way—where everybody can give of their best. I do not believe that many courts do that. I am saying that it has to be different. If you have too much adversarial behaviour and too much aggressive cross-examination, witnesses cannot give of their best. It needs to be avoided, but you will inevitably have a mix. You just cannot avoid it. Sometimes the adversarial gets to the truth, as well as the inquisitorial.
Kate Eves: I agree. As much as the Rule 10 process, in relation to the giving of oral evidence, puts a real strain on the inquiry team during the process of holding the hearings, my experience in Brook House was that part of the process is being able to demonstrate to the core participants that there is testing of what you are going to do. As Sir John says, it is about how you will conduct the hearings and make sure that everybody can give their best evidence. The use of Rule 10 to suggest questions is probably a way that enables you to keep the balance right. Yes, there were some witnesses who naturally leaned towards a more adversarial approach and some core participants who wanted that, for understandable reasons. I do not think I felt troubled that it was difficult to get the right balance, but you are right that it is very much in the hands of the chair to make sure that you strike that balance.
Brian Altman KC: In my experience, different inquiries and different inquiry chairs approach that issue differently, unsurprisingly. My experience in IICSA was that the chair would not permit any counsel or solicitor on behalf of a core participant to ask questions orally, albeit questions were put to counsel to the inquiry, who would advise the chair. If the chair agreed that they should be asked, they were; if not, no one heard about them.
In other inquiries, the chair will permit counsel on behalf of core participants to ask oral questions of various witnesses. There is no one size fits all. Much depends on the view that the chair takes of the nature of the inquiry and the engagement of families, or bereaved or victims, and how much their expectations are met by the inquiry itself.
I agree that, certainly when core participants ask questions, there is inevitably an adversariality about it because that is the nature of cross-examination. That is what it is. If one looks at the provisions of Rule 10, in certain circumstances, questioning is permitted by core participants. And sometimes, and I confess that I have been guilty of this myself as lead counsel to the inquiry, a particular witness comes along who, as John said, has behaved badly and there is an expectation that they do not get an easy ride. That is not to say that you rough them up for the sake of it, but the nature of the questioning to them will be a bit more challenging than it may be to someone who does not fall into that kind of category.
Lord Grantchester: Do any of your experiences lead to the conclusion that the committee should perhaps examine and look at possible improvements? Does the flexibility mean that it is difficult to draw conclusions?
Sir John Saunders: Different inquiries have to have a different way of doing it. As you will be aware, in some inquiries now, you cannot ask a question except through counsel to the inquiry, which must shorten matters immensely. We started as an inquest. We became an inquiry only because there was national security material that could not be heard at an inquest. At an inquest, families have the right to ask questions, so then to say to them, “No, you can’t ask any questions now it’s become an inquiry”, seemed to us not to be the right approach—although, of course, we used Rule 10 to make sure that they were kept in a reserved way.
If you can find some rules to do it, that would be great. For me, you had to try to do it as you went along. If I had tried to set out rules before we started, I would have found it difficult, but there are many more of you to decide that.
Q6 Lord Faulks: I declare my interests at the outset: I am a barrister; I have been involved in inquiries in various capacities; I gave evidence to IICSA; and I advised some of the parties in Sir John’s Manchester Arena inquiry.
I want to ask whether the process is adversarial or inquisitorial, particularly in relation to counsel to the inquiry. Sir John just said—it must be right—that the role of counsel to the inquiry is more investigative than adversarial. On reflection, does any of you think that there is a slight problem with barristers—often experienced and highly competent ones—acting as counsel to the inquiry with a background of adversarial tradition, being able, as it were, to accept answers that may not be consistent with what they sense is the case? Barristers are used to putting forward a case. In a sense, the inquisitorial process is directly contrary to that; it is finding out. Certainly my experience, having seen various very competent counsel operating, is that they sometimes tend to put forward a case rather than genuinely asking open questions and finding out. Do you think that there is any truth in that observation?
Brian Altman KC: I declare an interest. I have done criminal law for many, many years. I was a prosecutor at the Old Bailey. Then I was invited into the inquiry world, which is what I have been doing ever since, so I am going to hand over to you two.
Kate Eves: Thank you. I think the answer is no. The relationship between CTI and the chair is an incredibly important one. We spoke multiple times throughout the day, as evidence was emerging, and about my views on things I was particularly interested in or issues that I thought were becoming more important to me. It is perhaps easier for me because I am not from a legal background. My starting point was very much that this was about people giving their best evidence. In some cases, witnesses were clearly finding the process difficult.
I felt able to have conversations with the counsel team about what I thought was the right way to conduct the inquiry. If I had ever felt—I never did—that the line was overstepped and that it had become adversarial, I would have felt able to pull that back and explain that that was not the way I believed it should be conducted. I am not just saying that because Brian is sitting next to me.
Sir John Saunders: It is a really interesting question. If you are counsel to the inquiry and you have read hundreds of documents about the particular witness you are asking questions of, not to have some sort of view before you start is unrealistic.
With all inquiries, you have to be fair and open-minded if someone comes up with an answer that proves all your preconceptions completely wrong. There is a real danger of inquiries starting out with a view and finding that view supported, whatever. I have had experience of it happening once. It is quite alarming when it happens because it means that the inquisitorial process is prevented finding out things that, oddly enough, the adversarial system might have done. It is really difficult.
My personal complaint about the way in which people ask questions—because I am now interested in inquiries, I watch them occasionally—is how unbelievably long the questions are. Has anybody watched the Covid inquiry? They just go on. We had one, which was our record, where the question—it was from a lady who was in Canada because we were in lockdown—covered four pages of transcript. You had to keep saying to the witness, “Hang on, I’m sure there’s a question coming somewhere”. It is interesting. It is different from criminal cases and other legal cases; everyone needs to get all their information into one question before they ask it. That worries me, perhaps rather more than the cross-examination being inquisitorial.
Lord Hendy: Can I ask one question? It turns on something that we will come back to. Is the Rule 10 standard prohibition on core participants asking questions a limitation or not? One of the effects of Rule 10 is that, if you are a core participant or a representative of a core participant, you have to write down the questions, probably the day before, and give them to counsel to the inquiry. This means that, unlike when you conduct a cross-examination yourself, you cannot respond to whatever the answers are. You can nudge counsel to the inquiry or put up a note but, by then, he is five questions on. Is that problematic or is it just my imagination? I should say that I have been counsel to the bereaved and injured in half a dozen inquiries and inquests, so I have some experience of that.
Brian Altman KC: It can be a frustration for counsel who act on behalf of core participants because they feel that they have significant questions to put but the chair has determined that there will be no oral questioning and that those questions can be put only by way of a process and a series of deadlines that the chair determines through counsel to the inquiry, who advises the chair; and the chair may or may not permit them. It is certainly frustrating, if you are an advocate on behalf of the core participant, to sit there with both hands behind your back, as it were, hoping but not necessarily knowing whether counsel to the inquiry will ask the questions or ask them in the way that you would have done—or perhaps ask them in an adversarial way, as you would have if you were permitted to question the witness yourself.
There are hybrids that I have adopted, principally because, in the two inquiries to which I was lead counsel, the solicitors to the inquiry were from Fieldfisher. Martin Smith is a senior partner there and is encyclopaedic about all things in the inquiry world. This is not catered for in Rule 10; it could be worth the committee thinking about that. The hybrid in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, adopted by Fieldfisher perhaps long before IICSA, was a system whereby counsel to the inquiry would draw up what we used to call evidence proposals—question plans by another name—in which you would set out all the topics and themes and, sometimes, the precise questions that you were proposing to ask a particular witness. The evidence proposal would be sent to the core participants well ahead of time, according to a particular timetable or programme. They would look at it and say, “Well, what about this? What about that?” It would come back. We would consider it and run it past the chair. If we agreed that further questions or themes could be adopted in the timetable for a particular witness, we would then have a series of revised evidence proposals.
The good thing about the evidence proposal is not only that it would set out all the themes, topics and sometimes precise questions but that it would be accompanied by an index of the documents the witness would, or might, be taken to, as well as some documents of interest only. It would go to the witness. The witness’s bundle and the chair’s or panel’s bundle would be prepared on the basis of the evidence proposal, which was counsel to the inquiry’s blueprint for the evidence of that witness. Everybody knows where they are before they start. It reduces the angst of counsel acting on behalf of core participants that they are not having their say because, at a very early stage and not at the last minute—as you were suggesting—in a programme, they would know what was going to be asked.
We did that in Brook House. We certainly did it during IICSA. It works very well. I am not saying that it avoids core participants coming up with a series of questions that they had not thought of and dumping them at the last minute, which is always annoying, but at least it gives them a flavour of what is to come and they feel that they have engaged with it. That is something that the committee might look at adopting that as best practice, if not a rule.
Q7 Baroness D'Souza: As we have heard, there are many different types of inquiries in terms of approaches and key purposes. We have also learned that a large number of inquiries, perhaps the majority, are chaired by someone from the legal profession. Can you identify certain inquiries where you thought that a non-legal chair might be preferable? In effect, Ms Eves, I am looking at you in particular. I wonder whether you felt that being female and a non-lawyer was a help in the extremely sensitive inquiry that you chaired.
Kate Eves: In some respects, that probably is the case. There is a flip side. At the outset of the inquiry, questions were asked: “Can somebody who is non-judicial have the same kind of status? Will the inquiry be taken as seriously?” There is scrutiny that comes with being a non-judicial chair: “What on earth gives you the qualifications to chair something like this?” Maybe it is just because it is not the norm—there are usually judicial chairs—and maybe because it is usually men. Perhaps it is a twofold thing.
I personally felt that, because my professional background was as a subject matter expert, I was able to explain how experienced I am in the subject of the environments where people were mistreated. I found that background to be quite a compelling thing as a non-judicial chair, in that I very much have the subject matter experience. I understand the policy and procedural side of government; perhaps that gave me an advantage in thinking about recommendations and what would be practical and implementable—I just made up a new word. That gave an advantage, but there is perhaps a bit of uncertainty that comes with a non-judicial chair. What is the saying? Trust arrives on a tortoise and leaves with a hare. It is until you can prove that you are up to the job, and that comes more with the territory if you are non-judicial.
Brian Altman KC: I agree entirely. The Afghanistan inquiry is chaired by a Lord Justice of Appeal but the two inquiries to which I was lead counsel were both chaired by non-lawyers. In both, they—Alexis Jay in IICSA and Kate in Brook House—both were subject matter experts. We could not have done without them because they instinctively understood the subject matter, which a lawyer would not necessarily. That is not to say that a chair like John could not get on top of a subject that was alien to him—or her, as the case may be—over time but Kate, having been in the professional environment for many years, understood the subject matter implicitly. Therefore, the inquiry got off to a proper start in mapping out its terms of reference in consultation with the Minister, scoping it and so on whereas, if you had had a legal chair, all that would have inevitably taken much longer before people understood the essence of the topic of the inquiry, which was quite specialised in immigration and detention.
Baroness D'Souza: Would you be able to develop criteria for certain inquiries where it would be preferable to have a non-lawyer—someone who is a specialist in a particular subject but not a lawyer?
Brian Altman KC: If you mean rules, I think that would be very difficult. It is inevitably for the Minister who establishes the inquiry, of whichever department, depending on the subject matter, to choose who will be the best person for the job. Unquestionably, if I may say so in her presence, Kate was beyond doubt the best choice. She ran it as if she had always chaired inquiries, and was brilliant from start to finish. I do not think a judicial chair would have done the same job that she did. I have no doubt.
The only disadvantage that I can see—and it is a slight one—if I may put it out there, is when a non-legal or judicial chair is asked to make legal rulings. That is when the system slightly falls apart. The problem with that is this: who is making the determination if the chair is non-judicial and does not have a legal background? Sometimes core participants raise quite knotty problems. If you look at the Inquiries Act, as clearly you have, there are all sorts of elephant traps there. The question arises although, in my experience, nobody has yet asked the obvious—pardon the pun but it is the elephant in the room—which is: who is making the determinations, and who is writing up the judgments and the rulings? That is a slight problem, but I have not seen any challenge so far.
Sir John Saunders: I have no problem with any of that. I was chosen partly because I have been involved with a large number of terrorist cases and therefore have a background of understanding terrorism. I personally think that my particular inquiry may have been best done by a judge. It was extremely large. We had national security issues too. You would have to have the necessary clearance for anyone doing it. It may be that national security cases would need to be done by a judge but, otherwise, I have no problem with who does them.
Lord Davidson of Glen Clova: On that last point, Sir John, one of the most outstanding inquiry reports I had to read was by a civil servant and was on national security matters and WMD. It was Robin Butler—but that is not my point.
Mr Altman raised a point about rulings. If one has a non-judicially trained chair, there is a risk in relation to the obligation for fairness under Section 17. Everybody thinks that they know what fairness is but it can be rather technical. Do you think that there are risks that arise, in terms of fairness, which may then move into questions of Maxwellisation and so on?
Brian Altman KC: Oddly enough, I do not have in mind the overall idea of the concept of fairness because the lay chairs I have dealt with were always fair and applied themselves fairly to everything.
I have in mind the really difficult issues of restriction orders and other such provisions in the Inquiries Act, about which the chair will inevitably need an awful lot of advice in making determinations. Having said that, you would think that, in the kinds of inquiries that require quite a lot of argument and challenge to restriction orders—for example, the Afghanistan inquiry, where many of the hearings are in closed session because they deal with national security issues—the Minister will have thought in advance that a legally trained chair will obviously be the right fit. But, that is not to say that we did not have the odd legal issue to deal with from time to time. As you know, they come out of nowhere. You cannot always foresee them, but you have to deal with them as and when they arise.
So, I do not have a problem with fairness. I do not really have a problem at all. I am just raising an issue: there will be an inquiry with a lay chair where there is a really difficult legal problem and somebody will raise a challenge to it.
Lord Faulks: In general terms, the relationship between the chair of the inquiry and counsel to the inquiry is very important. I am sure that it varies according to the individuals. I would be grateful for any of your observations about how it ought to work, in particular whether there is any difference between when the chair is legally qualified and when they are not.
Sir John Saunders: It is absolutely vital, as you say. I was fortunate in mine. I am quite concerned about the legal issues arising. Counsel to the inquiry make their submissions, along with everyone else’s submissions; if you have someone with no legal knowledge at all, that could present quite a difficulty because they would be relying very much on what their counsel to the inquiry says. In reality, I also relied on what counsel to the inquiry was saying because I knew that they would be coming at it from an independent stance. They certainly knew much more about the law relating to inquiries than I did, certainly when I started. We all rely on the advice we are given but it may be that, if you are used to making judgments yourself, you analyse it in a slightly different way than if you are not used to doing that.
Baroness Berridge: I have a question about public confidence. It has been suggested that issues sometimes go to public inquiry so that they are out of the way of government. I saw it at the Dispatch Box only last week. The Government then say: “We cannot comment on this because it is the subject matter of an inquiry”. In terms of the rules—I am not talking about criminal or civil proceedings—is that really the case? Does it hamstring a government Minister from saying anything about it during the currency of your inquiry?
Sir John Saunders: No. The reason why they cannot mention it, if it is a criminal case, is that they might influence a jury. A chairman will not be influenced by it. That does not mean a politician cannot say, “I think we should wait until the inquiry has reported before we say anything”. That is up to them and it may be advisable. It is not for me to judge. I see no reason why people should not comment; they frequently do. It is not necessarily politicians. Some politicians comment during criminal cases, too.
Kate Eves: That is a no-no.
Baroness D’Souza: Would you be in favour of interim reports, then?
Sir John Saunders: Yes.
Q8 Lord Davidson of Glen Clova: I should have declared my interest before I asked my previous question. I have appeared in a number of inquiries, both for participants and for the post-Maxwellisation processes.
Do you consider that the Inquiry Rules 2006—2007 in Scotland—could be amended in some way to improve the procedure, particularly given the question of Maxwellisation? I think I detected that you, Ms Eves, were taking a slightly different cut on Maxwellisation than the lawyers on either side of you. Am I right in that? If so, why?
Kate Eves: It is an important part of the process. For example, in Brook House, I do not know the exact number of warning letters that we issued but it was in the hundreds; it certainly extended the process by about five or six months. In terms of fairness and setting out what the criticisms will be, I am not sure that I can see what an appropriate alternative to that would be. Much as I understand the desire to say, “Come on, you’ve had the hearings. Where’s the report?”, it is an important and precise period of the inquiry’s work. Doing too much to simplify that rule artificially would ultimately be to the detriment of what an inquiry can find. You potentially miss opportunities to identify where you may have made errors or where you may have missed evidence. It is an extensive and prolonged process for a reason.
Lord Davidson of Glen Clova: It follows, does it, that you are of the same view, Sir John and Mr Altman?
Sir John Saunders: Can I go the other way slightly? I do not think it needs to be rigid. The Leveson inquiry adopted a different procedure because it wanted to get things out very quickly. It is perfectly fair to say that it is pretty obvious, when you go through the inquiry, where criticism will come from. What Sir Brian Leveson did or, in effect, said was, “Here are the criticisms that are coming out. You’ve heard the evidence about it. These might form criticisms by us. Tell us what you think about it as we’re going along”. That can speed it up.
If I may say so, it is a good point to say that it should be a more flexible procedure. The chairman should be able to say, “Actually, we can do it in this way here”. Clearly, at some stage, if someone is to be criticised publicly, they need to have an opportunity to respond. However, that needs to be rigidly timetabled; otherwise, it gets out of hand.
Lord Davidson of Glen Clova: Do you depart from Mr Altman’s view that Rules 13 to 15 cannot be sensibly amended?
Sir John Saunders: I do not see why they should not be amended to make them more flexible. I have not thought of the drafting but I would like a more flexible procedure that allows, in the appropriate case—people can argue about what the appropriate case is at the inquiry—for a quicker procedure to take place, provided it is all fair.
Lord Addington: There is a feeling when you are doing an inquiry, in certain ones, that there has basically been a huge punt into the long grass. Everything dies a death and the world has moved on at the end of it. I appreciate what you have been saying. Do you think there is anything that you could step in that would keep it live? Could you enter provisional inquiries or findings? How would that fit in better to keep these matters live, and for people to feel that you are actually making progress?
Sir John Saunders: We split ours into three parts. We produced part 1, which concerned security at the arena itself—the people occupying it and running the show, and the police. That report came out while we were doing part 2. It was an incredible effort but it meant that we were bringing forward results.
I do not think that the subject matter of our inquiry was punting into the long grass. It raised a huge number of issues about how people deal with that sort of explosion, what you can do generally about making security better and what the police should have done. There were all sorts of issues that were not long-grass issues; they were about, “Let’s look at it and let’s get some proposals to remedy it”.
From my point of view, the way people have followed up on the recommendations is really encouraging. On another occasion, I would like to say something about the recommendations before the guillotine goes down, but things have changed and that is encouraging. I do not think that my inquiry was a long-grass inquiry.
Lord Addington: You are possibly the wrong person to be asked the question. Would the rest of the panel like to comment? There is definitely a feel, on certain other occasions, that this is going on and will never end. There are certain inquiries that have become hardy perennials of Parliamentary Questions. I am not the only person here who has gone, “Oh God, is that still going on?” Any procedure where you can get an idea that something is happening or some process is going through would help both people like us and those you are talking about.
Kate Eves: It is easier for larger inquiries to separate into different tranches or modules, however you want to term it, and to be able to issue interim reports that allow the issue to be aired publicly and be kept on the public agenda, providing some answers incrementally as you go through the process. It is harder to justify that for smaller inquiries. It can be problematic. That partly links to the ability to hold people’s feet to the fire on whether they are responding to recommendations. If you issue a report, make your recommendations then quietly go away, that then leaves the issue of what happens to those recommendations and their implementation.
It largely depends, probably. There was a lot of interest in the subject matter of Brook House but it is a very politicised area. I can understand that there was reticence in some areas to start talking about the content of what we found before we were right at the very end; that is understandable. I also think that, if you look at the landscape, things changed a lot in the four years that the inquiry was running, so it would have been helpful to have been able to come forward with some of the recommendations and some of the things that we were finding while we were still live and up and running. I am afraid that that does not give a very helpful answer but I certainly—
Lord Addington: Never mind. It is an answer.
Brian Altman KC: In IICSA, the inquiry was structured into different themes—or different investigations, as they were called. If my memory serves me, there were something like 15 or 16 separate investigations into, for example, Westminster, the Catholic Church, the Church of England, Rochdale, the internet and so on. Each of those investigations resulted in hearings that lasted no longer than three or four weeks. Maybe there were different parts, but not in many of them. Each of them resulted in a report. You would find, within six to eight months or perhaps a bit longer, that a report would be published. The warning letter process would be gone through with the core participants for that particular tranche of the inquiry. The inquiry proceeded in that particular way. If my memory of the statistics is accurate, it ended in something like 19 individual reports on the investigations that IICSA embarked on.
There was an interim report in 2018 and a final report, with all the main recommendations, in October 2022. I know, of course, that IICSA was roundly criticised over the years for taking far too long and spending far too much money, but it did result in at least those people who had a direct interest in individual investigations discovering what the chair and panel thought within a reasonable amount of time after the end of the hearing sessions. That was one structure, which worked for IICSA. It will not work for everyone. As Kate said, Brook House was a single-themed inquiry so, inevitably, it could not be carved up into separate parts.
Lord Addington: An expectation that there will be some result or report as quickly as is practical is something that I think would be reassuring.
Brian Altman KC: Yes; I think it worked very well in IICSA.
Sir John Saunders: That depends on being able to split it up.
Lord Addington: Yes; there is being able to split it up and take it on, but it is just the—
Sir John Saunders: Which we did as well.
Lord Addington: I know. I am just saying that it is good practice. Thank you.
Q9 Lord Wallace of Tankerness: In some respects, this is a follow-up to that. Section 14 says that the inquiry comes to an end when the report is delivered to the Minister. In answer to Lord Addington’s question and one of the earlier questions, you talked about implementation and follow-up. Do you think that the Act should be amended in a way that would give you some locus, post delivery of the report, to do something in relation to follow-up and delivery? What contact did you have with other inquiry chairs or inquiry counsel to try to identify best practice, or is there a corporate memory that just evaporates?
Sir John Saunders: Personally, I have been rung up by two new chairmen since then. I did not ring anyone up. If you have a good team who has been doing all the stuff—I had a solicitor who had done inquiries endlessly and counsel who had done a number of them—they help you with what is best practice. It is a good idea for inquiry chairmen to talk beforehand and ring each other up so that they benefit from others’ experience.
Kate Eves: I agree. Initially, the sponsor department assisted by saying, “Here are some contact details”. After that, I sought out other inquiry chairs who were potentially grappling with similar issues. I spoke to Sir John when we were talking about the recommendation and implementation phases, for example, because our inquiries were at similar points. That is important. Obviously, every inquiry is hugely different and every approach is very different. Certainly, I learned a lot from the approach that Manchester was taking in terms of what they were asking the sponsor department to do as a follow-up to the recommendations. I could wax lyrical about what you may want to consider about the role of chairs post publication at the end of the inquiry.
Understandably, there is a difference, depending on the inquiry, in the engagement that you get from the Government as to how they will respond to the recommendations and what they will do about implementing them. To me, it does not seem satisfactory that one chair could have a very good experience with the Government—asking for them to be involved and consulting them in whatever capacity to think about the right way to go about implementing the recommendations that they accept—and, in other cases, they just have the shutters go down and have no interest in doing that. That is quite troubling.
Brian Altman KC: I confess that, when I was asked to take over as lead counsel to IICSA, I had a ready-made team because I was not the first lead counsel; the originally appointed lead counsel departed the inquiry and I was brought in. I did not need to speak to anyone. I was a new boy. I had never done a public inquiry before but I had a very good team of silks and juniors, all in the public law and public inquiry space, who knew what they were talking about. They led me through it all by the hand. I had them to lean on; I did not need to speak to anyone. By the time I was asked to take over as lead counsel to Brook House, in not dissimilar circumstances, again, I did not feel the need to speak to any other counsel because there was a ready-made team waiting for me. My experience is perhaps exceptional.
I would think that most lead counsel to public inquiries do not feel the need to talk to other counsel, simply because each inquiry is different. If you talk the talk, as it were, you know what you are getting into. You simply start from the ground up and work with the knowledge you have in establishing the inquiry where you have been asked to take over as counsel to.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness: You will recall that a previous House of Lords committee suggested the possibility of an inquiries unit, possibly within the Cabinet Office. Do you want to comment on the merits or demerits of that?
Sir John Saunders: Speaking to the solicitor for my inquiry, he thinks it is a really good idea and asked, “Why do they reinvent the wheel every time?”
Kate Eves: I agree wholeheartedly. With the cost and the time taken to do a lot of what has to be done in the same way for every inquiry, however you might decide to run the inquiry substantively—things such as a document management system, office space and all the equipment you need for hearings—it seems like a real waste of resource to keep having to do it time and again. I cannot understand it.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness: You have made that very clear.
The Chair: Essentially, that is core to the efficiency, never mind the effectiveness, of an inquiry.
Kate Eves: Absolutely, yes.
Baroness Berridge: Referring to a previous comment you made about perception and the government department sponsoring and running it, do you think that it is the same point about the Cabinet Office? Or do you think that there is merit in an arm’s-length body because of the perception point? Obviously, decisions are still made by government.
Kate Eves: Potentially. I believe that the committee found that because it was so much less likely that the Cabinet Office was likely to be a core participant as a department. I can see that, yes, there are definitely merits in having what would in effect be an arm’s-length body of a government department, which would have all the corporate knowledge and all the contracts set up and ready to go. With things like the recruitment of staff, you are subject to what the sponsor department wants. It might take three months for you to get people in. That will automatically extend the timeframes for things, so maybe you could bypass that, but I can see that there could be a perception problem with the Cabinet Office itself.
Lord Davidson of Glen Clova: If I may follow up on that, there are a number of law firms in England that have developed expertise in inquiries. Is there any greater virtue in having a Cabinet Office unit or relying on private sector law firms?
Brian Altman KC: Do you mean for establishing and running an inquiry or for acting for core participants?
Lord Davidson of Glen Clova: I mean for maintaining the idea of an institutional capacity, so that one is not having to reinvent the wheel and go to the firm that has done a number of inquiries. Or does one set up a Civil Service-staffed unit?
Brian Altman KC: In principle, it is a good idea. In practice, the idea that the Cabinet Office, or some arm’s-length institution attached to government, will be able to resource and have sufficient people with sufficient know-how to run the kind of inquiries that we have all been involved in is just not reality. You will continue to need the kind of expertise that you have in the private sector. From my own experience, I have already named a firm of solicitors who were solicitors to inquiries—or at least assisted the inquiries with which I have been involved—without whom none of them would have happened. You might say that a sufficiently resourced central unit in or attached to government might do the same job only if they manage to steal all the expertise from the private sector—and that is not going to happen.
Lord Davidson of Glen Clova: Quite.
Brian Altman KC: I am afraid that they are here to stay. That is the reality.
Q10 Lord Hendy: I want to ask about the participation of core participants. It seems to me that there are probably three categories of core participant: the people who have suffered, such as the victims, the bereaved, the injured and so on; the people involved in immediately remediating the situation, such as firefighters and so forth; and the other parties who may ultimately bear some responsibility for whatever went wrong. First, do all three of you feel that that is an accurate characterisation? Secondly, do you think that all those parties are adequately represented under the rules?
Sir John Saunders: As far as I can say, they were in my inquiry.
Kate Eves: I felt that I had to be very conscious in thinking about the particular group that would fall into the victim category, as you have described it, and in ensuring that they would not be disfranchised for various reasons. I needed to make extra effort to make sure that I was able to reach those individuals so that they could be fairly represented. It is not always the case in every inquiry that the victims are necessarily automatically additionally disenfranchised. That was the case in my inquiry, so I just needed to think that through. Ultimately, the rules do not make it difficult to do that. You just need to be conscious of it.
Brian Altman KC: You cannot force or compel somebody to become a core participant. They have to consent. Again, in terms of the inquiries I have been involved in, and looking around at the other inquiries that are going on, they all depend on the nature of the terms of reference. Covid must have hundreds of core participants. Certainly, in the different investigations in IICSA, we had hundreds depending on what the nature of the investigation was whereas, by complete contrast, there are three in the Afghanistan inquiry: the MoD, the RMP and the bereaved families. It depends on the nature of the inquiry but I do not think that people are disenfranchised. Everybody can apply, subject to the rules being applicable in their case, for core participant status. Not everybody wants it.
Lord Hendy: Can I dig a little deeper on two particular points? One goes back to the Rule 10 issue. One of the distinctions of most of the inquiries I did on behalf of the bereaved and the injured is that they were before the new Act. The bereaved and the injured were therefore represented, could ask questions and so on. I hope they felt that they were properly represented. I must say, I find it difficult to see how a group of bereaved and injured who are not able to ask questions and are not represented—I know that it depends on the chairperson—would feel that they are sufficiently participating.
Sir John Saunders: You just have to make sure that they do. That is part of the chair’s job. The reality is that we had four different groups of families, because they were the people who had been there at the inquest, so there were four lots of representation. They were very helpful in digging out facts in the inquisitorial process.
If people asked follow-up questions because they were obvious from the answers they were getting, there was no way I was going to stop them by saying that they were going outside their Rule 10 permission. I think most chairmen would do the same. I believe that all our families felt that they were perfectly happy that they were able to ask the questions they wanted to and were having a fair crack of the whip. I can assure you that their counsel, who were extremely important people, would have told us many times if they did not feel they were getting a proper way of participating.
Lord Hendy: Understood.
Sir John Saunders: I am sure that you would have done the same.
Lord Hendy: Rule 10 is, therefore, sufficiently flexible to allow that to happen.
Sir John Saunders: It is in practice; we just use Section 17 if need be because you are doing what is fair and proper.
Lord Hendy: Of course. The second question touches on something you mentioned a moment ago: divisions among the bereaved and the injured. In some of the inquiries I have had, there were hundreds of people in the bereaved and injured group, with very different views on all sorts of things—including who their solicitors were. Some of them had already instructed solicitors before the inquiry started. The question of representation has to be resolved and narrowed down; you cannot have dozens of counsel or solicitors. In the inquiries that I was involved in, that was all resolved behind the scenes—with difficulty, but it was resolved. Is that an issue that our witnesses today have come across?
Sir John Saunders: Certainly, some people wanted to have their own solicitor. One person wanted the solicitor they had had for the inquest when the inquiry was an inquest, and that had to be sorted. As time went on, people became happy with what there was. As I said, we had four lots of representatives who divided the work between them; they took different topics and would primarily cross-examine or ask questions of different witnesses. It sorts out once everybody gets the hang of the fact that it is intended to be, and is, a fair procedure and that we are trying to get to the truth. You have done criminal cases, I have no doubt: when you were defence counsel, your client never believed in you until you asked the first question. Then, when he knew you were trying, everyone got happy with the situation. That is true of inquiries too.
Kate Eves: I would mirror that. We had lots of fairly fraught correspondence in the early stages about how many groups of solicitors people were asking for; we were able to work with CPs and the representatives to bring that down to a sensible number. You are right. It is part of the proof of the process getting going and showing that you are being fair and that they will not be disadvantaged by not having the one solicitor to whom they have a connection. It takes a little while to get there but we did not find it particularly problematic once we were up and running.
Q11 Baroness Sanderson of Welton: I should declare an interest: I helped to set up a number of different inquiries in my role as an adviser to Theresa May, including the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse after the hiccups that you mentioned.
On the inquiries I have been involved in, in particular IICSA, it is about the voices of the victims, the survivors and the families affected—whatever the groups are and whichever inquiry they involved with—and how they see it as their inquiry. We know that it is not just their inquiry—it is there to get to the truth of the matter—but, bearing in mind fairness and neutrality, there is also the point that they need to feel that they are involved in some ways. This is something that has grown over time. I would be interested in your views on that being a thing and how you do that while keeping neutrality and fairness.
Mr Altman, particularly in IICSA, the victims and survivors advisory panel was an interesting way of ensuring that the voices of victims and survivors who had spent decades waiting for the inquiry were heard. Understandably, they felt that they needed to have some input into its work. They were able to do that without overinfluencing because they obviously had a bias. I would be interested to hear a bit more about that. Do you think that it is transferable? Was it something just for IICSA or are there other ways we can think about making sure that their voice is central to these inquiries?
Brian Altman KC: Funnily enough, as you were asking me the question, I was thinking not so much about the advisory panel, although it had an important part to play, but about the Truth Project.
Baroness Sanderson of Welton: I should declare that I worked on that for a bit.
Brian Altman KC: Yes. As you know, the Truth Project allowed victims of child sexual abuse to approach it in confidence, if they wished. Operation Hydrant was in the background. If necessary, cases were referred from the Truth Project to Operation Hydrant for criminal investigation. I cannot remember the figures now but a substantial number of people attended Truth Project interviews.
Baroness Sanderson of Welton: About 6,000.
Brian Altman KC: That was the sort of figure in my mind—maybe not quite that, but it was certainly in the thousands. It allowed them to say things that they had long not said. The benefit of an inquiry such as that is that it allowed people, for the first time, to engage but not necessarily in a public-facing inquiry, which was very difficult for many people—not least because, if they did not wish to engage, they had lifelong anonymity as alleged victims of child sexual abuse. They came in their thousands. That, to me, was the most important—not public-facing but, nevertheless, highly present and highly important—aspect of IICSA. Whether that is possible in all kinds of inquiry, I doubt very much. It depends on the subject matter and the need.
Baroness Sanderson of Welton: The point being that it feeds into the understanding of the chair, the panel and all those working on the inquiry. The voice is there in that sense.
Brian Altman KC: Yes. It is all about engagement with people who are victims. The nature of child sexual abuse is such that people who, unhappily, are victims of it may not declare that they have been victims for many years—if ever. It gave them an outlet and that was very important.
Baroness Sanderson of Welton: The victims and survivors panel, which was a separate thing, was able to feed the voice of victims and survivors into the main panel. Was that a helpful thing or not?
Brian Altman KC: I am struggling to remember. I am being frank with you; I am struggling to remember.
Baroness Sanderson of Welton: You cannot say no.
Brian Altman KC: I, as counsel, did not deal with it, but I am sure that it offered advice to the panel. It often bypassed counsel because it was not something that I had to engage with, although it was very important. But it had a purpose, clearly, and the purpose is in the name “advisory”; I am sure that it advised.
Kate Eves: Perhaps I could add something. I had a very different experience with Brook House, in two elements. First, we were converted from a non-statutory inquiry to statutory following a successful judicial review of the decision not to hold a statutory inquiry. The expectations of the group of core participants that we might categorise as victims were already set, to some degree, because of the interaction there had been leading up to that. There was a real job for the chair to give confidence in the fact that the inquiry was going to be done thoroughly and properly. That was really important.
Inquiries are done no favours by the fact that, as we have talked about, they have to reinvent the wheel each time. The expectation of core participants, understandably, is that you have had a non-statutory inquiry, there is already loads of evidence and now you are saying that you cannot do hearings for another 12 months. It is important to do the process of expectation management for core participants early on. Often, as chair, it is the first time you are chairing an inquiry so, a lot of the time, you learn only as you do it yourself.
A Cabinet Office department or unit, where there is at least some clarity over how long those things will take, could help with the relationship with core participants. You can be very clear at the outset exactly what they can expect, so that they do not feel that the chair is potentially kicking the can down the road by not just getting on with things. It is understandable that, at the outset, they may feel like that.
Baroness Sanderson of Welton: The communication with them would undoubtedly have to change from the conversion as well. It would become much stricter, would it not? Potentially, that is very difficult.
Kate Eves: Yes, absolutely. That can cause some suspicion if it is not handled very carefully.
Sir John Saunders: We did quite a lot to get the core participants, the bereaved, at the centre of the inquiry. That involved descriptions of the children, particularly those who had died; they were unbelievably moving, as you can imagine. The families really appreciated that. Some people may say, “Why are you doing it?”, but it was really important.
In your previous report—not you; the previous committee—it was recommended that the chairman meet the victims. I personally do not agree with that because you have to look and appear to be completely impartial. We had someone in our team who talked to them all the time; one counsel talked to the victims, as well as their lawyers. Maybe it is a judge thing but I feel reluctant to be seen talking to victims and having conversations with them. However, it needs to be done. It adds to the length of these things but, otherwise, people will be disengaged from the inquiry and not feel that it is there for them.
Baroness Sanderson of Welton: Thank you; that is really helpful.
Q12 The Chair: I have a couple of final questions. Picking up something that was said earlier, we have been talking about process and a lot what we have discussed touched on improving efficiency. If we look at the effectiveness of the inquiry and touch on the report’s recommendations, is there anything you would like to see that would help in achieving the recommendations being acted on?
Sir John Saunders: We all want to talk about that, if that is all right. For me, it is the main thing that I have come away from the inquiry with. I did not quite understand why our sponsoring department was quite so keen on saying goodbye to me as soon as the inquiry was over. Then I saw, when reading the report of this committee in 2014, that they all seemed to think the same. We have now, with the sponsoring department, set out a system, or worked out a system, which I think works.
I and the inquiry, having made recommendations in the different volumes as they came along, followed up. We had a hearing after three months. The purpose of that was twofold. First, it was to make sure that something was being done—that people were not just saying, “Oh, we’ll do that sometime”, but were getting on with it. Secondly, it was to see whether there was anyone saying, “These recommendations won’t work. We can’t do them”, which would allow us time to change them. We were the only people who knew why we were making the recommendations and why the evidence was there. The idea at that stage of handing it over to someone else and saying that we would have nothing more to do with it seems ludicrous; there is also the fact that, as you would expect, we had a genuine interest in finding out. We had quite an argument about that but we managed to do it.
When we did it on volume 2, which was to do with the blue light response and was enormous, it got people moving. Lots of people had started. The police were already well under way, as was the fire service, but other departments had not got round to it. The man from the Home Office who came to give evidence on that occasion, when we got everyone back, said, “There’s been an amazing amount of activity around Whitehall in the last three weeks now they know they’ve got to come to a public hearing and say something”.
For me, a follow-up fairly immediately afterwards—within three months or six months—where we, knowing what we want, can check that someone is doing something, that they have understood what we want and that it works, seems obvious to me, I am afraid; I do not see why it does not to anyone else. The sponsoring department had the idea—again, it is reflected in the 2014 report—of a sort of separation of powers. It was said to me that there was a separation of powers; I do not know where the words came from in this context. It does not seem appropriate to me to say: “You do the inquiry and make the recommendations but we’ll deal with them and you’ll have nothing to do with it”.
We also had to deal with the Security Service. We could not get it to a public hearing but, before we did the recommendations, we got round a table with it and said, “This is what we want to do. Are you happy it will work?”. Once it knows it will work, it does not have much excuse for not doing it. We agreed between us a set of recommendations, so the Home Office has now set up a team dedicated to following up on the recommendations, of which there are a huge number. It put on presentations for the families; two were in hotels and one was virtual. It got people from the fire service, the police service, the ambulance service and everybody else to come along and say, “This is what we are doing. This is how far we have got”. The people who were talking were incredibly enthusiastic about what they were doing.
The care gap became very important during the hearing. People were doing things about it; they were going out in all directions. Perhaps this is a stupid example. In the hearing, I could never understand why 19 ambulances came, all the paramedics got out of the ambulances and went into the base camp, which had been set up to bring people downstairs from where the bomb had gone off, and were treating them there, stabilising them while people contacted the hospital and made sure that they were all ready for them. Then, when the hospitals were ready, people could not be moved because the paramedics were needed there and could not go off in the ambulances. They had to wait for more ambulances.
I was, I am afraid, tearing my hair—or what is left of it—out slightly in the hearing, saying, “Can’t you get someone to drive them? We’ve got endless policemen standing around”, but being told, “No, no one else can drive them”. During Covid, they had volunteer drivers, and now they have plans to use the same volunteer drivers who were used for that in these sorts of emergencies. People are thinking about it and coming up with things. I am sorry if that is a long-winded anecdote but it shows how things happen.
The Chair: Fair enough.
Sir John Saunders: I asked if it would be all right if I attended one of the presentations—the remote one. I was allowed to attend it and was really encouraged by what I saw. I said that I would not say anything but they said, “Oh no, we’d quite like you to say something”. Having been absolutely against my involvement, it seems to be going slightly against that now. I am in contact with the person in charge of the group at the Home Office doing the follow-up. It needs another layer of supervision; it needs a report, probably to a Select Committee, so that someone independent can say to the public, “This is being done”. It is more difficult with the Security Service, but it is needed. The public and the families need to know that what we have recommended has been carried out. I am encouraged by what has happened but it has been a battle—and you, Kate, are still fighting it.
Kate Eves: Yes. In an exercise of compare and contrast, as I said, I spoke to Sir John when we were approaching the same points of the inquiries. I was very encouraged by the response that you, Sir John, had been able to get in engaging with the sponsor unit. Unfortunately, I have not had the same experience. Although I know that a senior civil servant has been appointed to chair what they are calling a taskforce to co-ordinate the response to the recommendations, that chair was a senior policy lead in the Home Office at the time when the events took place and was the person involved in defending the JR into the statutory inquiry being established. To say that core participants will have faith in the independence and objectivity of that individual is, of course, problematic.
I have offered to do something similar to what Sir John is doing for Manchester. I have offered to come back at the six-month point, free of charge, to look at the response to the recommendations and talk through any issues that they see with implementation, as well as the practicalities of the recommendations. I have not had a response forthcoming to that.
What I am encouraged by is the interest of Select Committees. I anticipated that that might be the case, given the subject matter of the Brook House inquiry. I hope that it will continue. It strikes me as problematic that there can be such a contrast in the responses you get. It is a wasted opportunity, having spent four years immersing and knowing everything there is to know about the subject, not to use that to help with the implementation.
The Chair: Thank you. Mr Altman, is there anything you want to add?
Brian Altman KC: Not so much on follow-ups but I noted with interest this committee’s recommendation 31, back in 2014, about recommendations—that the public body that needs to respond should have a statutory obligation. I know that the Government of the day did not accept it but I do think there ought to be a statutory duty. The risk is always that an inquiry is being set up to kick a rather large can down a rather long road and it might suit the Government of the day not to respond when recommendations that the Government do not particularly like are made. Rather than its being voluntary to respond, my own view, being rather cynical, is that there ought to be a statutory obligation for the Government to respond in detail to the recommendations within the timeframe set by the inquiry that the Government have established.
The Chair: Even in the absence of a statutory requirement, from what you have said—they are not mutually exclusive—I presume that you would welcome the involvement of parliamentary committees that would have the authority to pursue it.
Kate Eves: Yes, absolutely.
Brian Altman KC: Absolutely.
Kate Eves: Formally, as well.
The Chair: Yes, exactly—that is what I meant.
Sir John Saunders: We invited the ISC to supervise the response to the Security Service. Originally, it seemed to want to do it but, unfortunately, for a number of reasons, it decided that it could not. It appeared at the outset the ideal body to do it.
Q13 The Chair: Thank you very much. I have a final question: if you could make one recommendation to improve the 2005 Act, what would it be?
Sir John Saunders: It would be to do with carrying out recommendations. It is pointless having inquiries and not doing what is recommended. It is fair enough for the Government to say, “We don’t accept it”. That is up to them, but not when they accept it and then do not do it.
Kate Eves: What he said.
Brian Altman KC: It was not always like that. Yes, that is my fundamental point.
The Chair: You can do great work and come up with great recommendations but, if nothing happens, we need to look at what happens next from there.
Kate Eves: Even in the period of time since 2019, when the inquiry became statutory, there was a change. I do not know whether it is because Covid meant that people were able to watch online inquiry hearings, whether it is because the Covid inquiry touches so many more people than perhaps the average inquiry does or whether it is because there are podcasts that cover inquiries so you can really dig in, but it certainly feels to me that there is much greater public awareness of the fact that they take place and cost a huge amount of money, as well as that nobody has to do anything about the recommendations at the end of them. It certainly feels to me that there is much greater awareness of that.
The Chair: That is an excellent point on which to end.
Lord Grantchester: Can I quickly jump in? Sir John, you ended by saying that it seems ridiculous to accept that they are not doing anything. Who are the best people to make something happen?
Sir John Saunders: Whether you have to do it in statute, or whatever, it is about setting out how recommendations have to be followed up. Select Committees are the ultimate, in the end. I have done only one inquiry; I appeared in one but, otherwise, I have not done any. No one told me before I started that I was going to have all these problems about getting the recommendations implemented or have anything to do with the recommendations being implemented. That should be set out in the terms of reference in some way so that everybody knows beforehand, rather than me having to go to talk to several Home Secretaries to try to persuade them to let me be involved, even on a voluntary basis.
The Chair: Thank you very much. That is extremely helpful and gives us a great deal of basis for what we are inquiring into. We are extremely grateful to you for coming this afternoon and being our first witnesses in this inquiry; it has aided us enormously. I presume that, if we have any follow-up questions, you would be happy to respond to them in the light of what you have said.
Kate Eves: Absolutely.
Sir John Saunders: Thank you for listening to us.
The Chair: Thank you very much indeed. We are now going to go into a private session but we thank our witnesses very much.
