Sworn, Silenced or Shut Out: Who Gets to Be a Witness Before a Public Inquiry
A public inquiry is a peculiar British institution. It has the solemnity of a court without its powers of enforcement, the openness of a hearing without its accessibility, and the moral weight of a reckoning without any obligation to act on what it finds. Ministers commission them; judges and senior lawyers chair them; and the bereaved families who campaigned for them in the first place sit at the back of a conference centre in another city, listening to their own lives being described in the third person.
That is not a reason to despair of inquiries. It is a reason to treat inquiry procedure as a human-rights arena in its own right — as contested, as political and as worth auditing as any policing bill or asylum reform. The Oxford Amnesty Lectures archive has long insisted that testimony is not raw material to be processed but a form of speech that carries dignity with it. When a state invites people to testify, it takes on obligations: to protect them, to equip them, and to make sure that what they say is not quietly lost in the machinery.
As statutory inquiries in England and Wales move through evidence and reporting in 2026, and as campaigners press again for a Hillsborough-style duty of candour on public servants, communities need practical tests rather than gratitude. Here are seven.
1. Who holds core participant status, and who was refused it?
Core participant status under the Inquiries Act 2005 is the gateway to everything else: to disclosure, to opening and closing statements, to the right to suggest lines of questioning, to legal representation funded by the inquiry. Ask the inquiry for its list of designated core participants and, more revealingly, for the applications it refused and the reasons given. Patterns matter. If bereaved families, residents' groups and small charities are consistently outside the door while institutional bodies are inside it, the inquiry has made an early editorial decision about whose account is authoritative.
2. Is the legal funding genuinely parity, or parity on paper?
Awards of costs to core participants are welcome and often hard-won. The test is whether they translate into a solicitor and barrister who can actually do the work at the pace the inquiry sets. Ask four questions: when was funding confirmed relative to the first evidence session; does it cover expert instruction as well as representation; does it cover the disclosure review that runs into thousands of documents; and what happens when a family's legal team changes mid-module because the money ran out? Funding parity that arrives late is not parity — it is a head start granted to the better-resourced party.
3. How is trauma actually accommodated, not just mentioned?
Good inquiries now routinely speak the language of trauma-informed practice. The test is whether that language changes the timetable. Are there ground rules hearings that consider breaks, intermediaries, pre-recorded evidence and the option not to sit in the same room as the person you are describing? Are witnesses given the questions in advance, or at least told the subject matter of each session? Is there a named point of contact who is not the inquiry's press office? Is there support for the weeks after testimony, when the adrenaline has gone and the transcripts are published?
4. Are warning letters written for the person receiving them?
Rule 13 of the Inquiry Rules 2006 requires that a person facing potentially critical findings be warned and given a chance to respond. These letters — often called Salmon letters — are among the most consequential documents a witness will ever receive. They are also frequently impenetrable. Ask whether the warning sets out in plain English what is being alleged, what evidence supports it, and what the deadline and format for a response are. Ask whether legal advice for that response is funded. A warning nobody can understand is not a warning; it is a formality that protects the inquiry rather than the person.
5. Can people outside the room follow the evidence?
Inquiries increasingly publish transcripts, evidence bundles and live streams online. That is a public good — and a new form of exclusion. Test the digital estate: are documents accessible to screen readers, is video captioned, is there a phone line for those without broadband, are transcripts posted the same day or the same month? Ask whether the venue is reachable by public transport and whether hearings are held near the communities most affected rather than nearest the chair's chambers. An inquiry that only hears from those who can afford a train fare has narrowed its own evidence base.
6. What is redacted, and who decided?
Restrictions on disclosure are sometimes necessary to protect vulnerable witnesses, ongoing investigations or national security. They are also the easiest place for institutional embarrassment to hide. Request the restriction orders and the reasoning behind them. Distinguish between redactions that protect a person and redactions that protect a reputation. Where material is withheld from a family but shared with a government department, that asymmetry deserves a public explanation.
7. Does the archive outlive the report?
The report is not the end of the story; it is often the point at which attention moves on. Ask what happens to the evidence, where the archive will be deposited, whether it will be catalogued and open to researchers, and how recommendations will be tracked over the years it takes to implement them. The Oxford Amnesty Lectures archive exists precisely because testimony that is not kept is testimony that can be quietly contradicted later. Communities should demand the same of inquiries: a retrievable record, so that the next campaign does not have to start from nothing.
None of these tests requires legal training. They require requests, persistence and a shared spreadsheet. Institutions count on the fact that scrutiny is tiring. The answer, as ever, is to make the scrutiny collective — and to insist that a witness is never a prop in someone else's proceedings.
