Public inquiries in Scotland must change as costs spiral, MSPs told

Public inquiries in Scotland must change as costs continue to spiral and the time they take to complete gets longer, MSPs have been told.

Professor Sandy Cameron said the country “can’t keep going like this”, before adding: “We need to think about other ways of achieving justice for people.”

The academic, who chaired the Independent Jersey Care Inquiry, told Holyrood’s Finance Committee he was worried about the lack of measures to reel in the high costs of public inquiries.

The cost of public inquiries in Scotland has ballooned to £230 million since 2007.

The Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry, which was announced in 2014 to investigate the abuse of children in care, remains the most expensive in the country, with a current cost of £95.3 million.

Scotland has several other ongoing inquiries, including the Sheku Bayoh, Scottish Covid-19 and Scottish Hospitals inquiries, which have run up costs in the tens of millions of pounds.

Professor Cameron said alternatives should be looked at that could deliver results for victims more quickly, while also saving the public purse.

But he said law firms, which he said often did a good job, do not have an incentive to limit costs.

He told the committee: “I think the way that legal colleagues work is very much on the basis of doing what they believe they need to do, rather than looking at how do they contain costs and manage costs.

“So, the expectation is, ‘this needs to be done, we will do it and we will keep going and doing that’, and a reluctance, really, to look at other ways that we might have done it, other ways that we could have contained costs.”

Prof Cameron added: “I think one of the questions that I would have is, can we find alternative ways of doing this that would manage the costs more effectively and deliver more rapidly for people?

“Because one of the problems, I think, is when you have inquiries that last for a very long time, the public lose interest in them.”

As well as the cost, Professor Cameron questioned whether lessons are being learned from public inquiries and implemented by authorities.

He said: “One of our concerns is that inquiries sit for a long time, they write voluminous reports, they make recommendations, and then what happens to the recommendations?

“What do we know about whether those recommendations were actually the right recommendations?

“Do we research that? Were they implemented? Were they implemented fully? What were the reasons for them not being there?”

He said alternatives to public inquiries could see probes conducted in less formal ways that could result in quicker and cheaper results.

He welcomed the Finance Committee’s investigation into the cost-effectiveness of public inquiries, which he said was needed amid questions over the budget, length, impact of and trust in inquiries.

Asked if fundamental alternatives to public inquiries should be looked at, he said: “I think so. I think the fact that you’re having this inquiry is really welcome.

“I think there’s a point of saying, ‘could this lead to rethinking what we do? Is there a different way of doing it?’

“Have we got to a point where we’re saying, ‘we can’t keep going like this? We need to think about other ways of achieving justice for people, of finding out what went wrong and being sure that we do actually learn the lessons’.

“So, I think yes, this could be an important point.”