Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee — hearing of 30 June 2026: transcript & video

00:02 - 01:28

Speaker 2

Order, order. Well, good morning colleagues to this session of our committee where we are looking into the recommendations of the infected blood inquiry. And we're very grateful and pleased to be joined by Sir Brian Langstaff, the former chair of the infected blood inquiry, and Jenni Richards KC, former counsel to the infected blood inquiry. We're very grateful to both of you for finding the time to appear before us this morning. And can I just put on record on behalf of the committee and Parliament, if no other committee has done so, can we thank you for the work that you did on that inquiry.

You'll know from the testimony that you heard just how important it is to so many constituents up and down the country, and an important piece of work was done. So thank you for all that you did. I'm going to kick off the question if I may. I'll start if I may with Sir Brian and then Ms. Richards, please chip in. Just to get your overall assessment if I may of the balance of the different type of inquiries, their efficacy, and the overall number being held.

And if you have any sort of thoughts on ways of making them leaner, meaner, faster, more focused, anything in that sort of sphere would be enormously helpful to us.

01:28 - 02:56

Speaker 1

I read, I can't quite remember the source, but just in the last few days, that the breakdown between statutory and non-statutory inquiries, just limiting it to that sort of inquiry, was about 80% statutory and 20% non-statutory. But of course that doesn't deal with other forms of inquiry which populate the landscape, coroners for instance, the ombudsman to the extent that ombudsmen get involved in something you might call an inquiry, or take the recent rail crash where you have the investigations branch now of the rail industry there and active and producing a reasons why statement fairly quickly. So there are all sorts of different inquiries, but what I think we are, you are focusing on, tell me if I'm wrong, is really the two, the statutory inquiry or the non-statutory inquiry. And I think the best way of starting is to say that no one size fits all. Whatever may be most appropriate to the issue in question, the issues in question, is the better model.

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