Chamber and committees

Finally, you say in your submission:

“The ECHR advocate that victim groups must have active and meaningful, not illusory, participation in Inquiries.”

I think that we would certainly all agree with that, but when it comes to core participants, what capacity does an inquiry have in that respect? With the Covid inquiry, for example, how many potential victims can there be? A thousand, 10,000, 50,000 or even 100,000 people could theoretically give evidence about the death of a loved one; there will be a lot of overlap and duplication in what they are saying, but they will be giving their own stories. Should there be a limit on that capacity, or can just anyone who wants to be a core participant become one? Obviously, having thousands of people give evidence will not necessarily add to the quality of what is happening. It will just delay things, and cost more.

I suppose that you do not want to say to one person, “You can come to court” and to another, “But you can’t”. However, perhaps you should, if, at the end of the day, they are not saying anything different from what others are saying and if the inquiry is on that sort of scale.

Okay. I am sorry, Michael—did you want to come in?

Thank you very much, Mr McGuire. Before you go, do you have any final points to make, or is there anything that we have not touched on that you want to emphasise at this point? The floor is yours for the last word.

New Zealand and Australia managed to bring in Covid inquiries in the space of a year or so for £5 million, whereas the UK one has already cost more than £200 million and the Scottish one has cost more than £34 million. I have not been aware of any real outcry in Australia and New Zealand that the process was not adequate, although we will be investigating that in the weeks ahead.

I understand what you say about judge-led inquiries being a gold standard, but the fact is that we have only 36 senior judges in Scotland. The Lord President has explained that appointing a judge has a substantial knock-on effect. A judge will sit for 205 sitting days, which equates to 34 criminal trials; currently, three judges are chairing inquiries, which means that there are 10 per cent fewer sitting days to hear cases. That means that other people are being denied justice.

The argument seems to be that the public inquiry subsumes everything else. For example, when there is an inquiry into a health board, the board has to redirect money from hip operations, heart surgery or whatever it happens to be, and that work gets delayed or has to be reduced, because of the impact on funding. The question that I am asking is why public inquiries should be in a situation where there seems to be no limit on the amount that is spent. The Sheku Bayoh inquiry, for example, has cost £51 million so far and counting.

Every other area of the public sector—health boards, local authorities, colleges, all other aspects of justice and so on—has to work within a budget, but you seem to be arguing that all of that goes out the window for a public inquiry, and that it is more important than anything else that happens in the public sector, including having police in the streets and operations being carried out in our hospitals. That seems to be the implication, because I am not hearing any ways in which we can really do things better, other than my suggestion in relation to the secretariat and all that stuff.

But hold on—you are saying that there should not really be any financial limit. There is no other area of the public sector that I am aware of that has an unlimited budget. I suppose that you could say that welfare is demand led but, other than that, everyone else has a specific budget that they have to adhere to.

I will let colleagues come in, but I am really enjoying our discourse. The Scottish child abuse inquiry has cost more than £100 million and has been on-going for 11 years, but the inquiry team has produced interim reports so that people can see what is happening in the inquiry. It is not one of those inquiries that seem to be sealed off and from which you then get a big splurge at the end. Should that mechanism be routinely introduced to inquiries, so that victims of an injustice can see that progress is being made?

Mr Henderson, you said that the proposed levy

“aligns with several principles of good tax policy”

but that the

“levy’s proportionality could be challenged if costs are passed onto leaseholders through increased purchase prices for new homes, undermining affordability objectives.”

The difficulty is that you are obviously concerned about putting up prices and, at the same time, we need the money to carry out the work.

When I was a councillor in Glasgow in the 1990s, one of my churches wanted to convert the church into eight flats. The difficulty was that the cost of meeting the standards 30 years ago was so prohibitive that it would not have worked financially. That meant that the church had to close, because it could not be converted to anything valuable.

I understand that it is a difficult balance to strike, because we could lose a building altogether because of the costs of trying to meet all the regulations, and they are already high, so if we were to add a levy on top, that could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. However, is there any evidence that this would make a decisive difference, on top of all the other costs that one would have to meet when converting an old building?

Interestingly, Professor Cameron, who was involved in the Jersey child abuse inquiry, was the first witness in this inquiry of ours. He said that the public inquiries team should do what the Jersey inquiry team did, which is to revisit the situation a year or two after the inquiry’s conclusion to see what had been done on the ground.

I want to ask you about the threat of a public inquiry. If, for example, the NHS or Police Scotland—or whoever might become subject to an inquiry—finds out that there has been a miscarriage of justice or an alleged miscarriage of justice, they would not just sit there staring into the headlights, waiting for the public inquiry to run them over. They will look at their systems as soon as they find out and say, “What did we do wrong? What can we change? What can we improve?” They might find that people need disciplinary action to be taken against them. Do you think that the threat of an inquiry has the impact of changing the activities of organisations?

That concludes questions from the committee. Do the witnesses have any final points to make? Are there any issues that they feel we did not cover in our questioning this morning?