PUBLIC INQUIRIES: A CURE OR A DISEASE?1
| Author | Stephen Sedley |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1989.tb02609.x |
| Date | 01 July 1989 |
| Published date | 01 July 1989 |
PUBLIC INQUIRIES: A CURE
OR
A DISEASE?’
IF
public inquiries are to be known by their fruits, and if their proper
fruits are reforms and improvements in law and practice, there is
probably not a great deal to be said for them. In the field
of
child
care, it is safe to say that only the very first
of
the numerous public
inquiries held in the last
five
decades either brought about or helped
to shape a major reform in the law: Sir Walter Monckton’s report in
1945
on the death of Denis O’Neill played an important part in the
genesis of the Children Act
1948.
It may be, too, that in the current
overhaul of family law the Cleveland Report: and perhaps some
fragments
of
other recent reports on child abuse, will play a part. For
the rest, if justification is to be found it has to be looked for else-
where, because by the time in recent years that child abuse inquiries
became a prevalent feature
of
the landscape nobody can any longer
have believed that they were a serious instrument of law reform.
Their effects on practice are another matter, to which
I
shall return,
but while detectable they have certainly not been uniformly positive.
My thesis is, however, that public inquiries play a significant part in
the management and government of this country, and one which is no
less real because its effect, like the proverbial effect of education, is
invisible.
The proliferation of inquiries into catastrophes
of
local authority
child care, and the media attention focused on them, have tended to
constrict our understanding
of
public inquiries as an instrument of
social and political management in that sensitive area where law
meets policy. The reason
I
call it a sensitive area is that in a society
which, for a mass of reasons lying beyond my present remit, needs its
law to be or to appear
to
be a system of Olympian detachment, the
courts cannot afford to get involved in overt policy-making; and yet a
variety of public issues can arise which because they concern policy
and practice rather than rights or wrongs are not litigable, but still
need somehow to be got away from the public shin-kicking contests
which they frequently provoke. In all these situations there has been
a
framework of law, usually both substantive and procedural, but the
disaster has occurred either within that very framework or in a
fashion for which the law offers no worthwhile redress,
so
that
enforcement of the law will be of very little use. It is precisely because
there is no ready resort here to litigation that public rows break out-
a striking reminder in itself of the therapeutic value to civil society of
an Olympian legal system. At the same time, there is commonly no
~
This paper is the text
of
the Mary Robertson Lecture delivered at Nottingham
University on October
6,1988.
A
debt
of
gratitude is owed
to
Ms. Shurouk al Sabbah
and
to
Professor
A.
W.
Bradley for advice on source material.
Report
of
Inquiry into Child Abuse in Cleveland,
1987;
Cm.
412.
469
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