After the final report of the Grenfell fire inquiry was published, Hisam Choucair, who lost six family members in the blaze, said: “We did not ask for this inquiry … It’s delayed the justice my family deserves.”
Although he thanked the inquiry for its findings, Choucair was devastated that the police had put the criminal investigation on the back burner until it had concluded. A decision on prosecutions is now not expected to happen until the end of 2026 at the earliest.
His reaction, which was echoed by others – Grenfell United said that “justice has not been delivered” – raises questions about what public inquiries are for and whether they can offer closure.
Jason Evans, the founder of the Factor 8 group, campaigns on behalf of those affected by the contaminated blood scandal. His father, Jonathan, died in October 1993 after contracting HIV and hepatitis C from contaminated blood. He said those affected by the scandal, which has killed more than 3,000 people, had been through the full range of emotions when it came to inquiries.
First there was the Archer inquiry, which was criticised for failing to hold anyone to account, then came the Penrose inquiry focusing solely on Scotland, which was condemned as a whitewash, before “a very deep level of psychological closure” came with publication of Sir Brian Langstaff’s report from the infected blood inquiry in May.
Evans said of that report: “I’m yet to speak to anyone in our community who doesn’t agree that our fight for the truth is over. There might still be questions around the compensation scheme but in terms of the what happened and why … it’s now accepted by everybody.”
As well as compensation, another live issue – as with Grenfell – is criminal prosecutions, although given that the contaminated blood scandal dates back to the 1970s it is likely to be even more challenging.
Echoing the words of Grenfell United, Evans said: “For some people, someone being criminally prosecuted is for them, essential, critical and absolutely must happen, or there’s been no justice. For other people – I’d put myself in this second group, I think – the time to have done that, sadly, has passed, and I’m not sure that seeing a 90-year-old man spend his six months left alive in prison would really mean anything to me at this point. If this was 30 years ago, I think my feeling would be slightly different, but that’s where I’m at.”
If the Langstaff report provided many infected and affected with the public validation they were seeking, a regret of Evans was that it was not afforded more time in the spotlight.
He said its media prominence “was just completely trashed by the general election [announced two days after publication]. And so we got a day’s worth of coverage and it was all kind of forgotten about in the public eye, which was sad really because people did have their day of truth and closure but they didn’t get the big, long-running national conversation. I just hope the Grenfell report gets more time in the public sphere than we got.”
One of the reasons it is important public inquiry reports are not allowed to fade from the public consciousness is to keep up pressure on governments to implement their recommendations, designed to prevent such tragedies recurring, but there are signs that people are becoming wise to the risk of recommendations being jettisoned.
In July, a coalition of people affected by the worst disasters and scandals of the past decade – including Grenfell United and Factor 8 – called on Keir Starmer to create an independent body to monitor recommendations from public inquiries so that they cannot be “left to gather dust”.
A House of Lords committee carrying out an inquiry into the effectiveness and efficiency of statutory public inquiries, is also examining the issue. Furthermore Martin Moore-Bick included as one of his 58 recommendations from the Grenfell inquiry the creation of a similar mechanism, noting that recommendations affecting fire safety had been ignored in the past.
The chairs of the infected blood, Manchester Arena bombing and Covid inquiries have all sought to monitor compliance with recommendations to ensure they are not ignored.
Perhaps the most striking example of recommendations not being implemented is the independent inquiry into child sex abuse (IICSA). In the government’s official response, the then home secretary, Suella Braverman, said that it would act upon all but one of its 20 recommendations, but more than two years on from publication of the final report none have been implemented. To the despair of survivors, that includes the key recommendation of mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse, a much-criticised version of which was included in the criminal justice bill, which ran out of time before the election.
Alex Renton, a child sexual abuse survivor and journalist, and core participant in the IICSA, said while the inquiry was therapeutic for those who took part, others felt excluded, and therapy was not enough. He said that without action there was the danger of giving credence to Boris Johnson’s “awful” 2019 comments about money spent on non-recent child abuse investigations as “spaffed up a wall”.
He said: “The true judge of a successful public inquiry must be the change it gets, in policy or law. So, for all the good that IICSA did – enabling survivors to be heard, digging hard at some of the systemic cover-up allegations – it has to be called a failure. So far.”
More than 10 years after the IICSA was announced and 50 years since children at his boarding school were sexually assaulted, he said: “What we as survivors, and I as a journalist survivor, can see, is that the protocols and regimes that allowed those who abused us to go unreported and indeed enabled to get references and go on to other jobs where they could abuse children again, really are no better than they were then.”