Further info for Public Inquiries & Ombudsman

• Sedley: '"If public inquiries are to be known by their fruits, and if their pro fruits are reforms and improvements in law and practice, there is probably not a great deal to be said for them."'
• Sedley: '"By being public it borrows one of the strengths of the legal system, funnelling the arguments away from the anarchy and subjectivity of public debate and into the apparently objective and orderly forum of a proceeding which the world can watch."'
• Sedley: '"The Blair Peach case as it happens illustrates a number of other aspects of my theme. Most recently it has illustrated the inefficacy of the courts as an alternative public forum for an issue of this kind."'
• Sedley: '"Inquests are thus another tolerably flexible and still useful for public inquiry; not an expensive anachronism in the eyes of conscious central government but a worthwhile element in the management of public controversy."'
• Lord Scarman: '"I believe that a judge does have special qualifications bot investigating disorders and for speaking about inner cities a trained adjudicator between differing parties. He is a trained investigator of fact. He is by office, and should be by nature impartial and detached.... Public disorder usually arises out of a sense of injustice. A sense of injustice is not limited to people with legal or judicial training, but judges will certainly have experience in uncovering it and have an instinctive understanding of the causes and consequences of injustice. Above all judge has a passion for righting injustice"'
• Sedley: '"A public inquiry can serve most or all of these ends. But one thing it cannot do is put an end to the publicity. The limelight will now swing on to the inquiry"'
• The new Inquiries Act gives government ministers unprecedented powers
• In reality, the new Inquiries Act gives government ministers unprecedented powers over the invitation, conduct, funding, staffing and direction of public inquiries
• Powers given to ministers under the new Inquiries Act


  • Ministers appoint the inquiry chair and panel, and can add to or change appointments at all time
  • Ministers write the inquiry terms of reference, and can change those terms of reference at any time
  • Ministers can suspend inquiries, or terminate them early
  • Ministers control inquiry funding and can withhold funding from activities that they consider to be outside the inquiry's terms of reference
  • Ministers can restrict public access to inquiry hearings
  • Ministers (rather than inquiry chairs) are responsible for publishing inquiry reports and they can withhold parts of those reports from publication
• Overall, these changes seem designed to reduce the independence of future public inquiries, and to provide the government with a host of mechanisms for controlling inquiries at every step
• It has been proposed that inquiries have six main purposes—establishing the facts, learning from events, providing catharsis for stakeholders, reassuring the public and rebuilding confidence, making people and organisations accountable, and serving the political interests of government
• It seems that the new Inquiries Act certainly fits that final purpose
• Inquiries are likely to be more cautious and narrowly focused affairs, less able to pursue important issues which arise during the inquiry
• Stakeholders (victims) are less likely to trust in the impartiality of inquiries when government ministers are able to influence proceedings from behind the scenes, and so it is less likely that inquiries will produce cathartic exposure and closure for people who were involved or affected.
• Ombudsman


  Traditionally, an Ombudsman is seen principally as a citizen's defender, whether against the state or other powerful groups, as a mechanism for settling grievances or as an alternative dispute resolution mechanism.
• It is the courts who can give an authoritative and impar ruling on what abstract rules of law require in a concrete situation when a citizen complains to them that his legal rights have been infringed; so too, when a citizen claims that he has been unjustly treated by the administration, the Ombudsman may similarly give a ruling on whether the agency in question has acted properly
• Yet, the 1965 White Paper proposing the Ombudsman made clear, the new form of protection was intended to complement, and not to take over from, the existing means of courts, tribunals, public inquiries
• Thus, to give one example, a good tribunal system citizen to appeal to an impartial and expert bo decisions which directly affect him, seems at le good government as an Ombudsman system
• the British tradition has emphasised the provision of an effective procedure for enforcement of rights…Although it did not provide a set remedy for the aggrieved citizens, it did provide a procedure for investigation of his complaints by the Ombudsman.
• Indeed, the power the English High Court are mentioned in the 1967 Act only relation to the Ombudsman's right to compel the attendance of witnesses and production of documents, and to refer to the court cases of unlawful obstruction of his investigation. It follows necessarily from this that the British Ombudsman has no power to extend the area of his investigations arbitrarily into such forbidden past as local government
• If this is so, then the British Ombudsman, supported by the Select Committee of the House of Commons, helps both in the process by which these basic norms are laid down and in the process by which the norms are enforced. Examples of basic norms that may easily be extracted from the Ombudsman's case-work include the need to handle a citizen's affairs with reasonable speed, particularly in a situation where it is known to the administrator that delay will be harmful to the citizen's interests; the duty to give correct advice to a citizen about his dealings with government and to refrain from giving incomplete or misleading advice; and, when new benefits are created by Parliament to meet the needs of particular groups, to take effective steps to bring information about the new rights to the attention of those concerned.
• But what seems important is that over a period of time it should become established that the Ombudsman can give support and assistance to categories of individuals in circumstances in which they a particularly vulnerable to defects in the administrative system on which they depend. In fact much of the Ombudsman's recurring case-work is concerned with the interests of a group of claimants affected by a particular branch of government
• One particular point of intersection is provided by the 1967 Act, which in section 5 (2) (b) provides that the Ombudsman shall not investigate any administrative action " in respect of which the person aggrieved has or had a remedy by way of proceedings in any court of law "; but the Act allows an investigation to be made where the Ombudsman is satisfied that it was not reasonable to expect the person aggrieved to go to the courts.
• In the 1967 and 1971 editions of his book, Administrative Law, Professor H. W. R. Wade stated that it was the Ombudsman's business "to operate beyond the frontier where the law stops"; but in the 1977 edition, the author accepts as inevitable a certain overlap between the Ombudsman and the legal system.