Scotland’s Habit Of Inquiry

On Scotland’s dependence on public inquiries and the political culture that keeps creating them.

Every bureaucracy produces the occasional document that functions less as guidance and more as an accidental confession. The Scottish Government’s guidance for ministers on whether to establish a public inquiry is one of those documents. It is sober, procedural, studiously careful – and yet, when read closely, it reveals something unintentionally comic and quietly unsettling: Scotland has become so dependent on inquiries that ministers now need written instructions reminding them what an inquiry is for.

The irony is hard to miss. Public inquiries were designed as exceptional instruments in a democratic system – solemn statutory mechanisms reserved for the gravest failures of governance, where the stakes were so high, and public confidence so shaken, that nothing short of a quasi-judicial investigation could restore trust. They were meant to be the fire alarm behind the glass, to be broken only when something had truly gone wrong.

But in Scotland today, the glass is permanently shattered. Inquiries have become our default mode of aftercare – the way we respond to crises, not because they demand the extraordinary, but because ordinary political accountability has grown timid.

The newly published guidance, though intended as a technical document, reads like a confession of that dependency. It warns ministers (in tones bordering on parental): inquiries are expensive; inquiries take years; inquiries cannot assign civil or criminal liability; inquiries should not duplicate existing processes; inquiries cannot substitute for political decision making.

It’s the kind of guidance you produce only when you suspect the tool is being overused – and misused. It is the kind you publish when the political class has stopped trusting its own judgment and has started outsourcing the appearance of seriousness.

The pressure behind its release is obvious. According to SPICe, Scotland has spent nearly £258.8 million on public inquiries since 2007. Nearly £30 million of that has been added in just nine months. The Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry alone has crossed £100 million – and no one begrudges that, because some inquiries are morally necessary.

But the more inquiries multiply, the more the pattern becomes clear: this is not simply a state responding to extraordinary failure. It is a political culture that has arranged its entire emotional metabolism around post-crisis investigation. The inquiry comes not after accountability, but instead of it.

This is not because inquiries themselves are flawed. Quite the opposite: they are a vital part of democratic architecture. They exist because Parliament created them; their procedures are governed by statute; their independence is protected by law. They are not a sign of institutional weakness, but of constitutional seriousness.

The problem begins when ministers treat them as a performance of seriousness – a way of signalling action without confronting the choices that would prevent disaster in the first place.

The guidance lays this out unintentionally. Every question it tells ministers to consider – Is an inquiry necessary? Are other investigations underway? Will it satisfy public concern? – exposes the fact that these questions are rarely asked in the heat of crisis. Inquiries have become a political reflex, not a political judgment.

And worse, the outcomes of inquiries are too often ignored. Scotland has accumulated thousands of pages of recommendations over the past two decades – on policing, health, care, fire safety, infection control, environmental failures, and institutional abuse – yet many of these recommendations enter the political bloodstream only briefly before being quietly abandoned.

The cycle persists: failure, inquiry, report, inaction, repeat. A state performing its remorse instead of preventing the return of what caused it.

There is one small paragraph in the guidance that crystallises the unease running throughout the document: a short, oddly defensive explanation of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. It notes that Scotland has never had such a commission; that they raise complex legal issues; that witnesses may incriminate themselves; that the reputations of the deceased might be affected.

“The problem is not the inquiries Scotland commissions. The problem is the state Scotland refuses to build. ”

No one asked for a TRC. No political actor is campaigning for one. Its inclusion is so unnecessary, so strangely placed, that it reveals the government’s anxieties more than its intentions. It reads like a pre-emptive disclaimer: ‘Let’s be clear, we aren’t doing anything that radical.’

But it also exposes something deeper. The very idea of a TRC evokes systemic truth-telling – the kind that confronts patterns rather than episodes. The guidance’s discomfort with even describing this model underscores the limits of the system Scotland prefers: episodic inquiries that examine discrete failures, but never the structures that reproduce them. Scotland will investigate incidents, but it will not interrogate culture. It will ask what went wrong, but not why crises recur.

In this light, the guidance becomes more than a procedural text. It becomes a portrait of a political culture that cannot stop commissioning inquiries because it has never learned how to stop producing conditions that make them necessary.

Critics fixate on the £250 million price tag. But this is the wrong economy. The real cost lies not in what inquiries consume, but in what the Scottish state refuses to build in their place.

Audit Scotland’s latest warnings about the NHS make this painfully clear. A system described as ‘financially unsustainable,’ with structural shortages, worsening backlogs, and fragile service models, is a system primed for future inquiries – not because it is malicious, but because it is stretched to snapping point.

Similarly, the SPICe briefing on inquiry cost-effectiveness stresses that inquiries often become the only mechanism trusted to clarify facts because routine investigatory functions are underpowered, underfunded, or politically constrained.

The lesson is not that Scotland needs fewer inquiries. It is that it needs fewer crises. And crises do not disappear through rhetoric, or exceptional mechanisms, or retrospective narratives. They disappear through investment in the institutions that keep the state standing when everything around it begins to sway.

A confident state would implement the recommendations it receives. A capable state would strengthen its regulatory, investigative, and accountability systems so that failures are caught upstream.

A serious state would present guidance that clarifies the purpose of inquiries, not one that inadvertently reveals how reflexive their use has become.

The guidance Scotland has published does none of this. It reads like a government warning itself against its own habits, without the political courage to break them.

Public inquiries are no longer Scotland’s emergency brake. They have become its compensation mechanism – the emotional aftercare of a political class that too often delegates its responsibilities to a statutory process it neither reforms nor respects.

The problem is not the inquiries Scotland commissions. The problem is the state Scotland refuses to build.

Until ministers learn to govern in the present tense, Scotland will continue to spend millions investigating its past – because that is the only arena in which the state still seems willing to tell the truth.