Opinion: the Home Secretary probably shouldn't resign over the inquiry debacle

On the 2nd of April, the Home Secretary DavidSwifty announced that the Government will be holding an inquiry into discrimination in law enforcement: in particular, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. This concept has been almost universally well received, given the undeniable racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia that exists within police forces like the Met: we are not even 15 years away from 2011's riots in London and the murder of Sarah Everard at the hands of one of her colleagues is still fresh in the public consciousness. Which makes it all the more disappointing to see that most of the attention has been focused not on the inquiry but on the legal framework under which it was set up.

Statutory inquries are usually held under the Inquiries Act 2005, which provides that the Minister (in this case, the Home Secretary) shall appoint a chairman and provide draft terms of reference. The main issue with the Government's inquiry – raised by my colleague, LightningMinion – is that the inquiry, as announced, was not an independent one. The Home Secretary would chair it and a member each from the Liberal Democrats and Labour would sit on it.

Even when the Government appoints an independent chair, there remains a perception that the inquiry is not entirely neutral, as a 2014 House of Lords report notes (though it should also be noted that the report reaches the conclusion that these inquiries are sufficiently independent):

Sir Stephen Sedley however felt the scarcity of inquiries under the Act might be because of reluctance by the Government to establish an inquiry due to the perceived lack of independence from the executive: “It does not look good if you set up an independent inquiry and retain the power to interfere with its proceedings.” This was the reason given by the Home Secretary in her letter of July 2013, refusing a public inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko. She wrote: “An inquest managed and run by an independent coroner is more readily explainable to some of our foreign partners, and the integrity of the process more readily grasped, than an inquiry, established by the Government, under a Chairman appointed by the Government which has the power to see Government material, potentially relevant to their interests, in secret.” But this reason was not accepted by the High Court, which overturned the decision.

Ultimately, the Government have appointed an independent chairman. I think this more or less resolves the matter (though I do have a few suggestions on how I should like it to proceed), but this is not sufficient for a recent opinion article published by the Liberal Democrats, who ask:

The big question we should be asking ourselves is how such a decision to appoint the Home Secretary, of such magnitude in incompetence, as chair of the inquiry and even Home Secretary even passed the Cabinet?

I think it's a fair question – frankly, I agree that it betrays some level of incompetence on behalf of the Government as a whole, because if I intended to set up a statutory inquiry I'd probably do some cursory research into what statute I'd need to use to set up that inquiry, and explore what requirements that statute imposes on me. Equally, it's undeniable that inquiries have decidedly fallen out of favour with British governments after 2014 – as far as I can recall, the last time a government attempted to hold an inquiry was 2019's Labour-Lib Dem-Classical Liberal-Social Democratic government holding an inquiry into ableism because the Chancellor of the Exchequer had called someone a retard.

In the broader context of what's happened, I remain unconvinced that this is a resigning matter. I think the Home Secretary deserves something of a bollocking from the Prime Minister, and I think it was silly to include in the follow-up statement that they had offered their resignation to the Prime Minister, because it puts ARichTeaBiscuit in a very undesirable position – either accept the resignation and lose a Home Secretary, or refuse it and be forced to continually justify their confidence in Mx Swifty. But the Government have not been dishonest, misleading, or in contempt of the House of Commons on this issue. In my mind, this means we refer the matter to the British public to judge the Solidarity government.

All of this, of course, distracts from the inquiry itself. I posit that making the inquiry statutory in the first place was somewhat ill-advised. It seems to me that the Government have some amount of desire to reform policing in England, given that they put the Home Secretary in charge of an inquiry into discrimination by law enforcement. If they are exploring how best to legislate that, a Select Committee may have been a better avenue to go, given their desire to include Parliamentarians in the conversation. I do not think it is too late to consider this approach, either – if they announce that they will forego the inquiry in favour of a Parliamentary committee, I would be supportive of such a move, and in my capacity as the First Minister of Wales I would welcome the opportunity to be involved in that discussion, particularly as justice policy in Wales was reserved to the UK Parliament until recently.

lily-irl is the First Minister of Wales and Labour MP for Essex.