Hansard Society

• Parliament Matters podcast, Episode 67: Should Parliament, rather than Ministers, oversee public inquiries?

UK Parliament

• Home Affairs Committee evidence, Implementation of Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, Professor Alexis Jay, 21 January 2025

• Armed Forces Commissioner Bill

German Bundestag

• The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Armed Forces

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Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production, supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.Uk.

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. Coming up this week

Ruth Fox: No action for seven months in government, now sound and fury in opposition. A withering Select Committee takedown of the Conservatives' response to systematic child abuse.

Mark D'Arcy: No handbrake turn as Hilary Benn declines to invoke emergency rules on the EU's single market in Northern Ireland.

Ruth Fox: And it's supposed to be the very model of a modern Armed Forces Commissioner. It's inspired by the system in the German parliament, but is our version all it's cracked up to be?

Mark D'Arcy: And Ruth, let's start [00:01:00] with a quick community note. People may be expecting to hear all about the assisted dying bill in this edition of the podcast. We've spun off a separate edition of Parliament Matters devoted entirely to events around the assisted dying legislation currently before Parliament, so all the analysis of what's being said and done, what's going on, what might happen in the future, will all be on that separate podcast, also out now, wherever you get your podcasts from.

Ruth Fox: That's right, and we're going to have this as a running series. over the coming weeks. So look out for that. And if you can, share it, forward it on for friends, family, colleagues who you think might be interested. Because this is genuinely, I think, Mark, a piece of legislation that people really are talking about in the wider public.

Mark D'Arcy: Absolutely. But Ruth, one of the big events this week in Parliament has been an absolutely stunning Select Committee hearing, the Home Affairs Committee talking to Alexis Jay who chaired the big public inquiry into systematic child abuse that we were discussing in last week's pod. This week she was in front of the Committee and she gave a [00:02:00] pretty damning verdict on the way the recommendations of her inquiry were handled by the previous Conservative government when they came out in 2022.

Essentially she said they did very little about it, to the point where she and colleagues eventually wrote a letter to The Times complaining that nothing had been done, at which point she got a telling off from a Government Special Advisor. So it was actually a pretty blistering takedown of the sound and fury that is now coming from the Conservatives in opposition, having done nothing about her inquiry recommendations when they were in government.

To be fair, they had a certain amount of excuse given the churn of government that was going on at the time. I mean, her recommendations were coming out at about the time that the Liz Truss government was imploded, which was not that long after the Boris Johnson government had imploded.

Ruth Fox: I think it came out, her report came out, the day Truss resigned, so it sort of got shrouded a little bit.

Mark D'Arcy: It hit in the interregnum, you might say, but, um, all the same, this is the kind of thing that you don't want [00:03:00] getting lost in the cloud of politics as usual. Politics as very unusual, I suppose you might say, going on at the time.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, nothing like getting the story straight from the horse's mouth, is there?

And the select committee got that. Sure of all, as you say, the sound and fury, the political fog that has surrounded this issue since Mr. Musk tweeted about it and set it all off. She was pretty blunt. I mean, she described the government's response at the time, so back in 2022, as inconsequential, unsubstantial, committed to nothing.

And she said, I've had lots of media requests in recent days to comment on this, to talk about it, and I haven't. But she did come to the select committee, and I think that's an important point about the role that select committees can play in moments like this, where the key player comes, gives evidence, very clear, very blunt, and sets something on the record, which everybody can then see. It's transparent, everybody can see the questions being asked, [00:04:00] see the responses, and it's on the record, it's recorded in Hansard, in contrast to all these sort of media briefings where you don't know who's talking to who.