Chameleon Magazine

Every public inquiry begins the same way:

somebody, somewhere, messed up — badly.

That’s the dirty secret no minister ever admits when they announce a new inquiry “to learn lessons.” These investigations don’t arise from curiosity or foresight; they’re born from failure, cover-ups, or catastrophe. When the dust finally settles, and the outrage can’t be contained, the government reaches for its favourite broom: an inquiry.

🧾 The Cost of Conscience

Between 1990 and 2024, Britain spent over £1.5 billion on public inquiries.

The average one now costs £20 million to £70 million, and the biggest — like the COVID-19 and Grenfell Tower inquiries — run into hundreds of millions.

Think about that.

That’s the price of a small hospital, or thousands of new nurses.

And yet, most of it goes to lawyers, consultants, and administrative staff digging through emails to confirm what the public already knows: someone failed to do their job.

🕰️ The Endless Loop of “Learning Lessons”

Every inquiry ends with solemn promises:

“We must ensure this never happens again.”

But somehow, it always does.

We had inquiries into blood contamination, into Hillsborough, into Iraq, into Grenfell, into COVID — and yet we keep producing more disasters that require more inquiries. It’s as if “learning lessons” has become the business model of failure.

Instead of competence, we get procedure. Instead of reform, we get reports.

And the wheel keeps turning — powered by the same taxpayers who fund both the mistakes and the investigations into them.

⚖️ Accountability as Performance Art

The real function of an inquiry isn’t truth — it’s theatre.

They create distance between the outrage of the moment and the slow decay of memory.

By the time the report finally lands, years later, the responsible ministers have moved on, the victims have aged, and the public’s anger has been carefully archived.

When the chair finally delivers the findings — often in a 1,000-page document written in beautiful but bloodless prose — it lands like a feather in a storm.

“Recommendations,” “oversight,” “training,” “revised guidance.”

The bureaucratic lullaby that puts accountability to sleep.

💰 The Real Question

If the average inquiry costs tens of millions, maybe the real question is this:

Wouldn’t it be cheaper — and better — if government departments simply did their jobs properly in the first place?

If they followed existing protocols, funded safety systems, and listened to whistleblowers, we could save not only lives but fortunes.

But until that happens, the public inquiry remains our most British institution: a monument to hindsight, generously funded by the people it failed.

🪞Final Thought

A functioning system learns from mistakes before tragedy strikes.

Ours waits until after the funerals, after the headlines, and after the cost.

Then it commissions a report to tell us what we already knew.

Public inquiries don’t fix failure — they memorialise it.

And that’s the real tragedy: the only thing we seem to learn is how much incompetence costs.