Italy is famous for many things: food, wine and its notorious bureaucracy. I’ve been there.
But is the UK far behind or perhaps in front, in the red tape front?
There were 69 public inquiries launched between 1990 and 2017, compared with a mere 19 in the previous 30 years according to the Institute for Government. Between 1990 and 2017, 46 inquiries made 2,791 recommendations. How many were implemented is not known.
But what is the point of PIs? Jason Beer QC, the UK’s leading authority on public inquiries, argues that the main function of inquiries is to address three key questions:
- What happened?
- Why did it happen and who is to blame? (In my view, in a crisis when everyone runs around like headless chickens, everyone is to blame.)
- What can be done to prevent this happening again?
Simple. At the end of 2017, there were nine open inquiries. The last time there were no active public inquiries was 27 years ago and since 1997 there have never been fewer than three running at any one time. The number of open inquiries peaked in late 2010 when there were 16 running concurrently.
The farce that is Covid Inquiry about who sends WhatsApp to whom is occupying a huge amount of m’learned expensive friend’s time. Who cares? It’s not expected to report until 2026 (and I doubt it’ll make the deadline. We might have a nuclear war at that time.
And these PIs go on for ages – the longest was 13 years – and a lot can happen in that time.
These things are pricy. The Bloody Sunday Inquiry topped £200 million. The Institute of Government reckons that PIs cost at least £690 million but that is a low estimate as it probably doesn’t include all costs.
So that’s a £1billion, say. You could build a couple of hospitals for that sort of money.
The Swedish completed their Inquiry months ago and came to one major conclusion: that Earlier and more extensive pandemic action should have been taken, particularly during the first wave.
Why can’t we just ‘cut and paste’ this simple conclusion and tend to this expensive farce of a COVID inquiry?
Have a good weekend
Tom
by the Planning PR guru 