Chamber and committees

Yes.

No—it is double that if you include both sides of the inquiry.

That is a very tentative response.

You have been answering the questions fairly directly, which is always welcome.

John Sturrock KC, in his evidence to the committee, said something that goes along with what I, John Mason and others said earlier: there are always tensions between

“time, cost, quality, justice and outcomes”.—[Official Report, Finance and Public Administration Committee, 17 June 2025; c 23.]

Michelle Thomson has sent me a comment—I will give her the credit rather than trying to claim it for myself. She says that it is worth mentioning that no other public sector projects run without project management and cost control, so why should inquiries be different? In addition, sponsorship teams are encouraged to familiarise themselves with lessons-learned reports on previous inquiries and the statutory framework, but do they do so?

I think that there is plenty. You are the Deputy First Minister of Scotland—surely you would be someone who would be giving leadership in that area.

But the Scottish Government selects the chair. Surely, if you are looking for a chair, you will look for someone who is actually going to take real cognisance of the impact and is not going to live in some kind of bubble for the next five or 10 years.

I appreciate that, but given the fact that we started our inquiry in April, it seems a bit odd that the Government only sent us the guidance six months later. One would have thought that the Government would have not only told us about the guidance, which it took two months to do after we started the inquiry, but sent it to us earlier. We did not receive it until October. In fact, members were sent it only late last week. That is a bit unsatisfactory, is it not?

Sweden has managed to struggle by since 1982 by having a two-year timescale on inquiries, and there does not seem to have been any collapse in public support for that. Sweden also manages to keep the cost of its inquiries down to a fraction of ours. Its Covid-19 inquiry cost less than £2 million and was sorted within around eight months. There is absolutely no need to have inquiries that go on year after year. How does that deliver justice for people?

The point about the opportunity cost is that there are people in our society who will not be getting the policing services that they need and deserve because resources have been diverted to inquiries. To be frank, it seems that, whenever I hear ministers talk about arguments for or against inquiries, I never hear any talk about the opportunity cost; there is always another reason why an inquiry should or should not take place.

If we are going to have big inquiries that take years and have a huge impact, is there an argument for having a central fund for inquiries so that they are not always impinging on front-line services? People can say, “Well, if the police got something wrong, it should come out of their budget”, but it is not the police directly who are impacted—it is the public who are impacted, because they do not have those officers in their communities if they have been redirected elsewhere.

We heard compelling evidence about the officers who are left on the front line being overwhelmed, because so many of their colleagues have been tied up in the Sheku Bayoh case, for example. That case involved 68 detectives or some other ludicrous number, for an incident in which—as Michael Marra pointed out—15 or 20 people were involved.

That is the issue. Justice is not just one-sided—it should not focus only on those who are calling for an inquiry and those who are delivering it. It is also about wider society and the impact that it has in that regard. If other societies and countries can deliver cost-effective, timeous inquiries, why cannot we? Why is it the only area of the public sector in which there is such an approach to the budget?

One could argue that the same goes for social security to a degree, as it is also demand led, but the budget for inquiries appears almost limitless. A inquiry can cost £5 million or £50 million. What will the Sheku Bayoh inquiry cost in the end—maybe £100 million? At the end of the day, who will justice be delivered for, if, indeed, justice is seen to be delivered? Is it for the policewoman who was assaulted, or for the family of Mr Bayoh? That is just one inquiry.

With regard to the Emma Caldwell case, her mother has said that she will be dead by the time the inquiry concludes, so who is justice being delivered for?

That is a flaw in the legislation, is it not? The taxpayer can be paying two separate rates for counsel in the same inquiry.

In his evidence, John Sturrock KC said that there is a need for

“education, understanding and clarity about the purpose of inquiries”,

with

“ministers perhaps being a bit more focused and clear about what they hope to achieve with inquiries and what the public is entitled to expect from them.”—[Official Report, Finance and Public Administration Committee, 17 June 2025; c 8.]