Beer: Radical form could help
Expanding the remit of public inquiries to award compensation, prefer criminal indictments and recommend regulatory sanctions, could improve their effectiveness, the head of the Post Office inquiry team has said.
Speaking on a panel at the Bar Council conference in Birmingham on Saturday, Jason Beer KC suggested the public “expect too much from inquiries”, wanting them to deliver regulatory, civil and criminal justice outcomes.
“The public need to understand that an inquiry is often the first step in the process and not the last,” said Mr Beer, adding that “a lot more happened as a result of [the ITV docu-drama about the Post Office scandal] than we have achieved”.
Alternatively, he went on: “We need fundamental change in the way that we operate inquiries and introduce some measures that make an inquiry more of a hybrid process.” This would allow them to make recommendations as to regulatory outcomes, award compensation, and act like old coroner’s courts in preferring a criminal indictment.
The head of 5 Essex Chambers said the idea might sound “radical”, but explained that he has been “struck” in a number of cases by the fact that regulatory action has been “put on ice” pending the outcome of an inquiry and often only happened a decade later.
Asked by Legal Futures, Mr Beer, who has been involved in around 25 public inquiries, declined to comment on the fact there have been no charges brought so far by the legal regulators against any lawyers who acted for the Post Office in the scandal that resulted in hundreds of postmasters being wrongly prosecuted due to fault accounting software and subsequent cover-up of the problems.
Both the Solicitors Regulation Authority and Bar Standards Board said in February they hoped to begin prosecution action in some cases in the summer of this year.
Speaking on the same panel, Lord Norton, who chaired last year’s House of Lords committee on statutory inquiries, said the process was perceived as a means of kicking issues “into the long grass”.
He suggested that length of time spent on inquiries, coupled with the cost – a “significant” element of which was because “so many lawyers” were involved – and the fact they often did not lead to change, resulted in “cynicism” that risked the public losing trust in them.
In February, the Institute for Government think tank found that, between 1990 and 2024, 54 inquiries costing at least £1.5bn made 3,175 recommendations, and there were 20 on-going or announced – the most ever at one time.
Lord Norton explained that once an inquiry has published its report, “it ceases to exist” and “has no status”, leaving a gap as to who should follow it up or pursue government for action.
He called for a mechanism to monitor the implementation of recommendations to “restore trust” and avoid a “downward spiral” in which “people will just lose trust in public inquiries”.
Looking at some reports, he said, his committee found that “if the recommendations had been implemented, there’s the possibility that later tragedies may not have followed”.
The peer suggested that holding non-statutory inquiries, like that into the Hillsborough football stadium disaster, presented a way of reducing the cost and number of lawyers, and involving the victims and survivors more.
Mr Beer, who is instructed by National Health Service England in the Thirlwall Inquiry, examining the NHS’s response to the crimes committed by the nurse Lucy Letby, said that the chairwoman’s team had created a table of recommendations made by previous health care inquiries going back to 1981.
“It is 978 pages long and marks in green and red whether there’s been implementation of the recommendations or not – and the document is mainly red,” said Mr Beer.
“You see sometimes the same recommendation being made not twice, not three times, but 18 times – over and over again.”
He advocates the creation of a body or parliamentary committee with specific responsibility for overseeing implementation of recommendations across inquiries.
Mr Beer accepted that non-statutory inquiries “may provide an opportunity to de-lawyer the room”.
But he stressed: “We’ve got to remember that these are moments of national controversy or emergency. They are in relation to plane crashes, boat crashes, rail accidents, crisis of confidence in the government, crisis of confidence in the press, where people’s careers and reputations are on the line and I think it’s natural for people to wish to be represented by lawyers.”
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