Cost of public inquiries to be examined by MSPs

The cost effectiveness of public inquiries in Scotland is to be investigated by Holyrood's finance committee.

MSPs will examine what spending controls are in place to ensure the taxpayer is getting value for money from the statutory probes.

Last year the BBC revealed nearly £200m has been spent on the four public inquiries currently taking place in Scotland.

This included more than £3m on the salaries of those chairing the inquiries, which are examining the Covid crisis, hospital safety, child abuse and the death of Sheku Bayoh.

The latest available figures show that a total of £173.2m has been spent on the four ongoing public inquiries.

This includes £91.9m on the child abuse inquiry and £34m on the Scottish Covid inquiry.

These costs are met by the Scottish government, which has previously said the inquiries provide important opportunities to establish facts and learn lessons.

Two further statutory public inquiries were announced last year.

One will look at the investigation of Emma Caldwell's murder in 2005 and the other will consider disgraced surgeon Prof Sam Eljamel who harmed dozens of people while working as NHS Tayside's head of neurosurgery.

Kenneth Gibson MSP, convener of the Finance and Public Administration Committee, said: "It's a subject that no Holyrood committee has examined in depth before, and members are keen to do so as part of our public administration remit.

"We'll consider options shortly.

"If agreed by the committee, it has the potential to be a really interesting piece of work given the significant sums of money that public inquiries often involve."

Last year BBC Scotland asked dozens of public bodies, such as councils and health boards, how much participating in public inquiries had cost them.

A number of organisations said it was not possible to work this out. Those which responded had spent a total of £36.4m in preparing and giving evidence.

The cost of Scottish government-initiated public inquiries are dwarfed by those which have been called by the UK government, including the £178m spent on the Grenfell Tower Inquiry alone.

Last year a House of Lords investigation into public inquiries made a number of recommendations, including improving how recommendations are monitored to ensure they are implemented.

John-Paul Marks, permanent secretary to the Scottish government, was asked about public inquiries when appearing at the last meeting of Holyrood's finance and public administration committee.

He said: "They are only so many controls that we have and ultimately the point of a public inquiry is that it should have the full authority to investigate, and we work with the secretariats of those inquiries to try and support them to undertake their work in a full and comprehensive way that gets to the underlying truth and learns the lesson properly.

"But they do take time, and they have a cost - so when to move to a public inquiry is given careful consideration."