Another inquiry report, another massive public policy failure revealed
If we had proper parliamentary accountability and ministerial responsibility in real-time, we would not have to keep relying on inquiries to reveal what really happened.
There are so many governmental scandals that it is difficult to keep up with them all, and one horrific scandal this Substack has not before covered is about contaminated blood.
This week this inquiry report was published, and even a cursory view of its conclusions is evocative of the public policy failures that have been covered here.
There are two points in particular which will stand out for followers of this Substack.
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The first point is that it appears that officials did not tell ministers everything. You may recall that this was also the problem with the Post Office horizon scandal. You may also recall that the Afghan war crimes inquiry has also revealed that officials were not forthcoming - and even obstructive - even when there was a determined minister seeking explanations.
It is this disconnect - if not breakdown - between ministers and departments that undermines and indeed discredits the old doctrine of individual ministerial responsibility (which I also wrote about at Prospect).
A minister cannot be meaningfully responsible to parliament (and thereby to the media and the public) if they themselves are given duff and misleading information. As the techies among you will know: GIGO - or garbage in, garbage out.
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And this leads to the second point: this inquiry is yet another example of an exercise in accountability that should and could have been undertaken by parliament and in real-time. (My Prospect piece on this is here.)
Instead, and long after many of the key events, it has been left to an inquiry to show what happened at the material times - and what went wrong at the material times.
As such, this is another example of failure by our parliamentary system to provide proper, real-time scrutiny.
Parliament is simply not well-equipped to force information and materials out of an unwilling government. Parliamentary questions are easily batted back; select committees have few real powers to prise out documents.
And our media is also not well-equipped. Press offices are unhelpful when the queries are unwanted; freedom of information in the United Kingdom has no real teeth. A great deal of press scrutiny - perhaps too much - is dependent on briefings: information is disclosed only when it suits someone in government.
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How many more inquiries - with damning detail and revelatory narratives - are we to have before we realise that it is parliament that needs significantly strengthening?
Parliamentarians should have access to coercive powers to compel evidence from ministers and officials which are no less powerful than those available to public inquiries.
And parliamentary questions as a norm should be addressed to and answered by the actual officials responsible, rather than the evasive and convenient fiction that ministers are responsible for entire departments.
But all this would require taking parliament seriously.