‘Inquiry Culture’ – Our Response

A recent article in the New Statesman claimed that ‘Britain’s inquiry culture radicalises victims’. You can read that article here. Below is our response.

To lose a loved one in a disaster the state could have prevented is to live with two truths at the same time. The first is brutal and unchangeable, our mums, dads, partners and children are dead and nothing will bring them back. The second is the reason groups like ours exist, we cannot change the past, but we can change what happens to other families in the future.

That is why we campaigned for the Covid Inquiry, and why Grenfell families, Hillsborough families, infected blood campaigners and Post Office victims fought for inquiries of their own. Not because we enjoy “reliving the past”, and not because we have somehow failed at grief, but because we do not want anyone else to go through what we did.

Anoosh Chakelian’s article, which claims Britain’s “inquiry culture radicalises victims”, gets this exactly the wrong way round. It suggests bereaved families are stuck in “complicated grief”, that inquiries trap us in the worst days of our lives and that our attempts to influence policy are misguided at best. It even sets the death of a parent to cancer, where no one can be put “in the dock”, against deaths caused and worsened by human decisions, as if the existence of accountability is the problem.

The problem is not that the state has built too many routes to justice, it is that it keeps giving us reasons to use the few we have.

Grief does not need a diagnosis and a five stage flow chart before it becomes legitimate. The “stages of grief” idea is widely discredited by grief experts, yet it is still trotted out as if there is a correct emotional timetable that ends with quiet acceptance for everyone. Many of us in Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice learned the hard way that grief for a preventable death will never fit that neat model. Our grief is “complicated” because there was nothing normal about the way our loved ones died.

Some of our relatives died alone on Covid wards without us able to say goodbye. Others were told not to worry because Covid would be a “flash in the pan”. Some died in care homes that were supposedly protected by a “ring of steel”, then later had their cause of death denied by Covid sceptics, or dismissed because they were older or disabled and therefore somehow expendable. That is not the same as losing someone to an unavoidable illness. It is not “doing grief wrong” to be traumatised by negligence, denial and lies.

We also know that there is no single “bereaved view”. In our group alone there are thousands of families with different politics, faiths and personalities. Not everyone wants to sit through hearings or speak to the media. That is fine. People bereaved by cancer do different things too, some keep their feelings private, some raise money for hospice care, some run marathons for Cancer Research. No one writes sneering columns pathologising them for it.

The article makes much of the fact that organised groups speak out in public, as though we have set ourselves up as an “official victimdom” talking for everyone. We have never claimed that. What we do claim is that those closest to the harm have something important to say about how to stop it from happening again. On that, history is firmly on our side.

The piece manages to discuss “inquiry culture” without mentioning the Post Office Horizon Inquiry at all. It is hard to think of a clearer example of why inquiries matter. Postmasters were wrongly accused, bankrupted and in some cases driven to suicide because of a faulty computer system and an official cover up. Only a determined, long and painful fight for an inquiry finally tore that injustice into the open, guaranteeing exonerations and compensation.

The same is true elsewhere. The Hillsborough Independent Panel and subsequent processes exposed how families were smeared and failed for decades. The Grenfell Inquiry has set out in detail how deregulation, cost cutting and indifference turned a tower block into a death trap. None of this would have come to light through private grieving alone.

For Covid, the stakes are just as big. The first report from the Covid Inquiry, on resilience and preparedness, found that the United Kingdom entered the pandemic underprepared and unequal, with existing warnings ignored and key plans missing or out of date. The government’s own response admits that lessons have to be learned and that pandemic planning needs to be strengthened.

Our group has worked for years to shape that future. We pushed for proper terms of reference for the Inquiry, we produced our own blueprint for preparedness, and we helped secure government commitments on crisis-management training, reinvigorating national exercises, and improving the culture to ensure that staff can speak up when they identify dangerous gaps. Concrete changes that will save lives.

There is also a hard financial truth here that the article barely touches. Critics complain that the Covid Inquiry may cost around £200 million. That sounds like a large number until you set it against the real bill for failure. Billions of pounds were wasted on unusable or overpriced PPE during the pandemic, and an estimated £10.9 billion was lost to fraud and error in Covid support schemes alone. Through its recommendations, the inquiry is laying out a detailed blueprint that will not only help protect the economy, saving billions when the next crisis hits but will save lives. The question is not whether we can afford to learn lessons; it is whether we can afford not to.

So when the New Statesman runs a piece suggesting that inquiries harm victims by keeping them trapped in the past, it is not just insulting, it is dangerous. It feeds a wider effort to paint public inquiries as self-indulgent, backwards-looking, and “lawyer-driven”, to turn the public against one of the few tools we have to prise open the truth when institutions fail us.

If you really want fewer inquiries, the answer is simple: have fewer catastrophic failures and fewer cover-ups. Stop hollowing out regulation, stop treating safety and preparedness as optional extras, and stop regarding bereaved families who ask questions as a nuisance to be managed.

Words like “radicalise” do not belong anywhere near families who stand outside inquiry buildings holding laminated photographs of their dead. They belong with the politicians who played culture war games with public health, the corporations that put profit before safety, and the systems that chose secrecy over candour.

You can call us what you like. You can accuse us of being stuck in the past because we refuse to pretend that what happened to our families was just bad luck. You can roll your eyes at people who still wear masks to protect others, or who still talk about Covid when you would rather forget it. But at least be honest about what you are objecting to. You are objecting to accountability, not grief.

We will keep turning up at the Inquiry, because we know what is at stake if this country once again shrugs its shoulders and moves on. If wanting truth, responsibility and change for everyone is what counts as being “radical” in Britain today, then perhaps the problem is not with us, but with what passes for normal.