INQUEST’s challenge to Andy Burnham: make inquiry recommendations harder to bury

INQUEST reports that Andy Burnham gave a supportive response to its call for independent oversight of inquiry recommendations, after Kensington and Bayswater MP Joe Powell raised the need to prevent another Grenfell.¹ Ministers should now be judged on the machinery they establish to turn that support into action.

The charity’s campaign, launched in 2023, seeks an independent body to track, monitor and secure implementation of findings and recommendations from inquests and inquiries.¹ The principle should be straightforward: establishing what went wrong must create an obligation to explain what happens next.

INQUEST describes a recurring pattern of coroners’ warnings and inquiry recommendations going unheeded, allowing the same failures to recur.¹ Its director, Deborah Coles, told Parliament’s Justice Select Committee that “one of the big areas we’re being failed by is the lack of follow-up on all these recommendations”.¹ That is the accountability gap ministers need to close.

The families of Ruth Szymankiewicz, Matthew Caseby and Gabriel Santer also gave the committee evidence about failures to act following their relatives’ inquests.¹ Bereaved families should not have to become permanent monitors of public institutions.

There is a serious qualification. Complex recommendations can reasonably take years to implement, and work in progress deserves recognition. A useful oversight system must distinguish justified delay from inertia, and partial delivery from completion. It should also permit recommendations to be challenged, provided rejection comes with public reasons.

Each recommendation should have a named institutional owner, a published response, a timetable and evidence of delivery. Accountability should survive a change of minister, government or civil-service leadership. Neither party should get to treat inherited recommendations as someone else’s responsibility.

For follow-up journalism, Grenfell, Infected Blood, Post Office Horizon and Covid should become continuing reporting assignments: track each recommendation and test every claim of progress. Publication day should begin that scrutiny.

INQUEST says the Bingham Centre’s report endorses its oversight proposal, particularly when combined with parliamentary scrutiny.¹ Burnham should make the commitment concrete. Another promise to learn lessons cannot substitute for a public record of whether those lessons changed anything.