£200m bill for four Scottish public inquiries — with more to come

Four public inquiries currently underway in Scotland have cost almost £200 million, it has been revealed.
The government alone has devoted more than £150 million of public money to its judge-led investigations in historic child abuse, the Covid crisis, hospital safety and the death of Sheku Bayoh.
But figures released using freedom of information laws shows that councils, health boards, the police and other public bodies have spent at least another £36.4 million.
Some authorities were unable to say how much they were spending — or said it was hard to calculate the costs of time for officials and legal advice.
There have long been concerns that public inquiries take too long and cost too much.
The Saville inquiry into the 1972 Bloody Sunday shootings was ordered by Tony Blair in 1998 but only reported back in 2010 after spending more than £190 million.
The £13 million Edinburgh Trams inquiry took nearly a decade to publish its excoriating verdict on local authorities.
James Mitchell, professor of public policy at Edinburgh University, told BBC Scotland, which reported the FOI figures: “I think it would be dangerous to say we should not have public inquiries but we have got to be careful that they are not just used to push an issue off the agenda.
“In some cases we are certainly getting value for money from public inquiries, in other cases maybe not so much.
“Without wanting to add to the number of inquiries, we could do with some reflection to figure out how we could do it much more cost effectively — but also effectively in terms of what follows from them, in terms of are they acted upon?”
There are two further public inquiries scheduled to begin soon, in to the investigation of the 2005 murder of Emma Caldwell in Glasgow and in to the work of disgraced surgeon Sam Eljamel in Dundee.
Jules Rose was among those campaigning for the latter. She said it had taken far too long to get off the ground, as patients looked for explanations of what went wrong. Rose was operated on twice by Eljamel before his suspension.
Rose said: “I’m not happy with how long the public inquiry took to get off the ground. We’ve been pushing the government and NHS Tayside on this for ten years to get answers. It has been a long, tiresome and arduous journey that no patient should have ever had to undertake.
“It only came to fruition when we took the campaign to the next level when it was evident we were never going to get transparency from NHS Tayside. It was the tail wagging the dog with NHS Tayside and the Scottish government. It’s only through robust and relentless campaigning from the patients that we managed to obtain the public inquiry.”
The Scottish government stressed that the point of such inquiries was that they were independent — so costs were a matter for the judges in charge.
A spokesman said: “In many cases, such as the Scottish Covid Inquiry, they are set up with the support of the Scottish parliament.
“Public inquiries operate independently of government and it is for the chair — who has an ongoing duty to avoid unnecessary costs — to direct how he or she carries out its functions.”