Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee
16 June 2026
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Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee House of Commons
00:04 - 01:50
Speaker 2
Hello, good morning colleagues, and day two of the week and our second meeting of the week, so I'm very grateful for everybody being here today. And I'm particularly grateful to Lord Norton for joining us to help us as we embark upon our work with regards to Parliament and public inquiries. And we'll all remember that it was the infected blood inquiry's report which effectively said, huge amount of work is, I paraphrase, but a huge amount of work is done, a vast amount of recommendations made. Secretaries of State usually stand up in Parliament and give a statement or answer an urgent question, and the caravan moves on. And the parliamentary scrutiny of the delivery of the recommendations and cross-referencing back to the inquiry chair is often, well, best described probably as hit and miss, more miss than hit.
So it will fall to, it looks to be this committee of Parliament to do the sort of umbrella overview work, and discussions are obviously ongoing with Cabinet Office and the Leader's Office and Liaison about that. Lord Norton, your committee in the Lords did a massive amount of work, so we're being rather cheeky, I'm afraid, so apologies for the cheekiness. Your brain is here to be picked to stop us having to, I suppose, reinvent the wheel and to pick up your sort of key learnings and advice, how you think we might be going about this. So again, we're very grateful to you for finding the time for joining us. And I'm going to turn to Mr. Lamont to open the batting.
01:50 - 02:07
Speaker 1
Thank you, Chair. Good morning, Lord Norton. The Statutory Inquiries Committee considered the format of inquiries in favor of a more flexible approach, including the use of non-statutory inquiries. What's your assessment of the balance of the different types of inquiries that are used?
02:07 - 02:29
Speaker 3
Well, the point we were making is there's no one size fits all. So it really depends upon the nature of the problem you've identified and then how you go about it. I mean, we distinguished in terms of running inquiries between efficiency and effectiveness. Now, there are deficiencies in both respects. But when it comes to actually establishing an inquiry, it depends on what you're seeking to set up.
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