What is justice for Grenfell? After seven years of public inquiry we have a 1,700-page report and a cost of more than £200m. We have had investigations, books, plays and more than £100m spent on an ongoing police investigation.
Yet so far we have no closure, no prosecutions and no convictions. The word ‘“justice” does not appear in the recommendations of this week’s Moore-Bick report of the inquiry’s findings.
Ask any lawyer why, and you will get a knowing smile. Justice means trials, more delays and more fees.
At some stage it is small wonder that victims cry out for the precursor of justice, which is revenge. Those principally to blame for the Grenfell disaster have long been identified, primarily the makers and the regulators of the tower’s cladding. Why have they been allowed seven years of immunity and prosperity? It is no wonder victims’ families and others are demanding they be thrown in jail.
The answer is that the “judge-led” public inquiry has become an embedded institution in British democracy. By postponing blame, it somehow softens the guilt and gets a generation of politicians and regulators off the hook. When the Institute for Government (IfG) in 2019 looked back at the 68 public inquiries held in the previous 30 years, it found they had cost a total of £639m.
Since then, they have gone into overdrive. The state-owned Post Office has so far spent £250m in external lawyers’ fees as a result of the Horizon scandal, including in the ongoing public inquiry. The inquiry into the 1970s infected blood scandal, now 50 years old, has cost £140m, with compensation payments still to be finalised. Various nations faced with the same scandal sorted it out in the last century. The seven-year Chilcot inquiry into Britain’s disastrous involvement in the Iraq war was even told to suppress delicate evidence, a scandal in itself.
As for the ongoing Hallett inquiry into Covid, it has already consumed £94m and is likely to reach £200m by 2026. Other European countries set up inquiries into the pandemic and learned its lessons as a matter of urgency. Sweden’s commission into its handling of the pandemic published its final report in early 2022.
The give-away in the IfG report was that one in seven inquiries took more than five years to report, while only six cases produced evidence of a parliamentary follow-up. The public inquiries had served what seemed their hidden purpose, which was to delay blame until those responsible had passed out of sight. That is the only reasonable conclusion for the seven-year Moore-Bick Grenfell enterprise. British government scandals are like medieval entertainments, with courtiers whiling away the time watching the peasants fight for some revenge.
The trouble is that the desire for revenge turns to one answer: prison. The cry has gone up – why is no one in jail for Grenfell? Why should the presumed guilt of 58 individuals mentioned in the report have to await another bout of “justice”? Why for that matter are no Post Office executives in prison, given the dozens they sent there? Why are there no prisons for the pedlars of infected blood, from which thousands died?
The maestro of crown prosecution, the present prime minister, has taken credit for rapidly putting behind bars dozens of rightwing demonstrators. He has given them a punishment – imprisonment – that will scar them for life. Justice was administered in days rather than years.
Britain is obsessed with prison, largely because the judicial system is so ritualised and archaic that it has lost touch with modern life. This has led Britain to the threshold of reaching a record 100,000 inmates. That is 136 per 100,000, against 67 in Germany and 56 in Norway. Five years ago, a Dutch court even refused to extradite a drug dealer to Britain on grounds that its prisons were “inhumane”.
Britain has appalling prisons and a public sector clearly not up to reforming them. Reoffending by short-term prisoners (which is at more than 50%) is said to cost the taxpayer an extraordinary £18bn a year – which would make up the majority of Starmer’s so-called “black hole”. We are not rehabilitating convicts, we are professionalising them. Yet this week, the government proposed plans to add to prison numbers by jailing executives of water companies who persistently pollute rivers and lakes with sewage. In which case, why not the officials who let them?
Last month came a breath of fresh air from the new prisons minister, Lord Timpson, with his company’s long record of aiding former inmates. He reckoned that only a third of prisoners should have been locked up. The rest needed the sort of remedies adopted by more progressive regimes such as those in Norway and Germany. In the cases of Grenfell, the Post Office and infected blood, this should surely mean heavy fines, dismissals and restrictions on office-holding. In most non-violent crimes, this should be coupled with various forms of restorative justice.
Reform is not to be found in interminable lawyer-led inquiries, nor in the primitivism of the jail cell. Reform can lie only in an intelligent and sensitive government. As lawyers wander back to the Grenfell trough, what hope is there of that?
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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This article was amended on 6 September 2024. An earlier version said that Britain has reached 100,000 inmates which amounts to an incarceration rate of “136 per thousand” of the population. That should have said 136 per 100,000.
