The life and tragic death of Professor Jason Arday and the call for a Public Inquiry
In Paternoster Square, at the International Dispute Resolution Centre opposite the stone mass of St Paul’s Cathedral, the architecture does some of the talking before a witness says a word. Across the plaza, power wears two faces: the old authority of church and empire in Portland stone, as against the modern authority of glass, security barriers and controlled access of a nondescript building turned Inquiry room. Inside the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI), the setting sharpens the central drama of every public inquiry. Secrecy is brought into light, but only by process; private acts are translated into public testimony; and accountability arrives not as a single verdict but as a ritual of disclosure, challenge and endurance. The scene is theatrical, certainly, but the theatre matters. It is where institutions that once operated behind closed doors are required to answer in public.
What does it mean to sit in an inquiry hearing room and wait for the state finally to answer for its egregious conduct? I have spent enough of my professional life in and around such rooms to know that the answer is never simple. An inquiry can be the place where truth is finally spoken aloud, where a family hears an institution, in the words of Sir William Macpherson, recognize, acknowledge and – eventually – accept what it has done, where public record catches up with private grief. It can also be where accountability is deferred, anger managed, and political pressure ameliorated while the machinery of process turns on for years. That is the question to ask in considering whether and why there should be a public inquiry into the death of Professor Jason Arday: would it illuminate the truth, or merely postpone the moment when those with power are required to answer for what happened?
As a lawyer who has represented the victims of state misconduct in inquiries, including those mentioned below, I do not romanticise inquiries. I have seen too much of how they work. But I do not dismiss them either. Some of the most important facts this country has ever been made to confront have been exposed not by government goodwill, but by victims and families refusing to let the state move on.
The case for an inquiry is powerful and real and does not rest on sentiment because the public function of inquiries is far greater than just the production of a final report. As set out in the landmark judgment of the House of Lords in the case of R (Amin) v Secretary of State for the Home Department, Lord Bingham’s classic formulation remains the clearest statement of purpose: an investigation is required to ensure, so far as possible, that the full facts are brought to light; that culpable and discreditable conduct is exposed and brought to public notice; that suspicion of deliberate wrongdoing, if unjustified, is allayed; that dangerous practices and procedures are rectified; and that those who have lost loved ones may at least know that lessons learned may save others.
So is there a case against having an Inquiry. Public inquiries can compel attention in a way little else can. They can establish a public record. They can force witnesses to attend, produce documents and answer questions. They can create a forum in which those most affected are not treated as an inconvenient afterthought but as people entitled to voice, recognition and a stake in the process. The fact is, in my view, process matters far more than recommendations. If those at the centre of the disaster do not feel they own the process, trust it, and have been heard by it, the report at the end will not repair the harm. Inquiries are, at their best, acts of public recognition. They say to the bereaved and victims: what happened to you matters enough that the state must answer in public. This is not simply a question of bureaucratic housekeeping; it is a very public reckoning.
Public inquiries are commonly expected to answer three questions: what happened, who is responsible, and what can be learned to prevent recurrence. A report produced by the Institute for Government stresses that the public interest does not stop at blame. The report rephrases Bingham’s dicta by noting that the interest lies also in preventing recurrence, improving institutions, regulations and behaviour, and restoring public confidence where ordinary political or judicial mechanisms have failed. Inquiries cannot determine criminal or civil liability, but they can establish a public account of failure and force institutions to confront it.
That being said, those calling for a public inquiry need to be alive and wise to their limitations. The case against an inquiry is not bound by cynicism. It is arithmetical in nature. According to the Institute for Government report, since 1990, governments have spent at least £638.9 million on public inquiries. There have been 68 such inquiries in that period. Only six received full follow-up by select committees. The average inquiry took two and a half years to report, and nine have taken five years or more. Between 1990 and 2017, 46 inquiries made 2,791 recommendations. Inquiries can lead to cultural change; Stephen Lawrence is the clearest example of that. But implementation is patchy. Governments announce inquiries in urgent terms but then too often treat the final report as something to be shelved, diluted or quietly ignored. That is not cynicism. It is a documented pattern.
This is why I have long thought that inquiries sit in a morally ambiguous place in our constitutional life. They can be instruments of truth. They can also be instruments of political management. A government under pressure can announce an inquiry and sound serious while pushing the real reckoning years into the future. Ministers who might otherwise have to answer now can say that matters must await the inquiry. Institutions can wrap themselves in cooperation while disclosing only in stages. Meanwhile victims and the communities come from live inside a bubble of delay. The issue is thrown into the long grass, but in a manner clothed with the dignity of law.
To understand both the necessity and the insufficiency of inquiries, one need only look at the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry. The Macpherson report did something this country could not afterwards unhear: it found institutional racism. It rejected the easy excuse that the failures were merely the product of error. Mere incompetence, the report said, could not account for the whole catalogue of failures, mistakes, misjudgments and lack of direction that bedevilled the investigation. That conclusion mattered, and it mattered far beyond policing. It changed the public vocabulary of race and institutions in Britain.
But Macpherson was not powerful just because it coined a phrase. It was powerful because it exposed, in forensic detail, what had actually been done and, more significantly perhaps, what was not done. The report also preserved for the record the appalling racist and violent language of the suspects themselves — the raving bigotry, the fantasies of racist killing, the obsession with knives and violence. And it went further still. It criticised the treatment of the Lawrence family and of their solicitor as another example of institutional racism at work. I do not cite that personally. I cite it because it showed how thoroughly the system could regard even a family’s demand for truth as part of the problem rather than the beginning of accountability.
Macpherson therefore stands for two propositions at once. The first is that a public inquiry can tell the truth in a way ordinary institutional processes have conspicuously failed to do. The second is that the telling of the truth can arrive years after the decisive failures, when what victims wanted in the first place was action. That tension has never left me.
It is present again in the Undercover Policing Inquiry. Here, too, the process matters because the public hearing matters. In June this year the Divisional Court – in the case of R (UCPI Designated Lawyer Officers Core Participant Group) v Sir John Mitting the court upheld the inquiry chair’s power to compel a retired undercover police officer (given the cipher HN86) to attend the inquiry in person to give oral evidence. That mattered for reasons extending far beyond one retired officer. The court recorded the lines of inquiry the chair considered especially important: oversight and authorisation of intelligence gathering on the Stephen Lawrence Campaign; allegations of racism and discriminatory targeting; managerial knowledge of undercover officers’ sexual relationships; the use of the identities of dead children; and undercover involvement in criminality. Those are not peripheral matters. They go to how the state used its powers, what it permitted in secret, and against whom those powers were directed.
The most powerful part of that judgment, to my mind, was not the technical question of statutory construction. It was Baroness Lawrence’s evidence about why oral testimony matters. She said that those responsible, or suspected of responsibility, should provide their testimony so lessons can be learned; more importantly, that they should face the people they harmed and not avoid public scrutiny. That is precisely the point. Public process is not decorative. It is not a theatrical extra. It is the very point of the exercise. The public hearing is where institutional distance narrows, however imperfectly, and those who exercised power in private are required to account for it in public.
Yet the UCPI also shows the limits of inquiry justice. It has taken some 10 years since inception. Disclosure battles are endless and soul destroying. Redaction is now routine. The state and the police almost always control the bulk of the information at the outset. Core participants are told that the process exists for them but often feel that they are neutral observers rather than participants. When questioning is controlled from the centre and follow-up is limited, people can feel that they are inches from the truth without quite being allowed to seize it. Once again, the process contains both dignity and frustration in equal measure.
The Grenfell Tower Fire Inquiry is an even starker example. Bereaved, survivors and residents (BSR’s) wanted urgent criminal accountability immediately after the tragic events of 14 June 2017. That desire was, and remains, entirely understandable. But the inquiry process necessarily unfolded over countless years, not months. What it finally established was devastating. The fire was the culmination of decades of failure by central government and others. One very significant reason the tower came to be clad in combustible materials was systematic dishonesty by the manufacturers. Arconic deliberately concealed the danger of Reynobond 55 PE. Celotex falsely marketed RS5000 as safe. Kingspan knowingly created a false market. BRE failed, and the certification and approval bodies failed with it. The TMO neglected basic fire safety obligations. Carl Stokes, its fire assessor, misrepresented his qualifications. The London Fire Brigade’s failings were attributed to chronic organisational and management failures. Those are not marginal criticisms. They are findings of systemic and moral collapse. And to cap it all it has been reported that Arconic paid shareholders £23m more in compensation than to the victims of the fire.
Could any process other than an inquiry have assembled that account with such breadth and authority? Probably not. And yet Grenfell also demonstrates why families can feel that an inquiry is both indispensable and intolerable. Indispensable because without it, the public would not have the full map of dishonesty, negligence and regulatory failure. Or as Counsel to the Inquiry pithily put it, the ‘web of blame’. Intolerable because the very scale of the process meant that the state had time — time to reorganise, to apologise selectively, to promise reform, to let outrage cool, and to separate the pace of truth-telling from the pace of criminal accountability. In that gap, trust drained away.
The Zahid Mubarek Inquiry tells a similar story in a different register. Zahid Mubarek was beaten to death on the 21 March 2000 by his racist cellmate hours before he was due to be released from Feltham. Prison files had recorded the killer’s violence and racist extremism. A letter written beforehand said he would kill his “pad mate” and ended with a swastika. The inquiry found over 186 failings and made 88 recommendations. Again, the value of the inquiry lay partly in recommendations and partly in exposure: it established that this was not an unforeseeable freak event but the product of a system that had ample warning and still placed a vulnerable young man in fatal danger.
If one widens the lens, Victoria Climbié belongs in the same national indictment. She dies on the 25 February 2000 at the tender age of eight. At the time of her death she had suffered 128 injuries. Police, doctors and social workers all had contact with her. The inquiry found that the agencies involved failed to protect her on at least twelve occasions and made 108 recommendations. It is difficult to think of a clearer illustration of institutional failure not as an abstraction but as a chain of missed opportunities in which every link says someone else will intervene. Here again, the inquiry’s historic significance is obvious. Here again, so is the frustration that a child had to die before the state would comprehensively examine how its systems actually behaved.
Compare and contrast this to the case of Loraine Whiting. Heard of it. I doubt it. Shocking facts? Without a shadow of a doubt. Loraine Whiting thought that she had finally managed to escape her violent ex-husband but on the l0 of March 1995 he turned up at her new home disguised as a police officer and for three hours terrorised her. Finally, he shot her three times in her leg and then put the gun in his mouth and killed himself. Loraine didn’t die immediately and managed to dial 999 for the ambulance service. Within 7 minutes an ambulance arrived at her house but the police (who were also there) refused to let the crew go in to treat her. An hour passed with Loraine still on the telephone begging for someone to come in and help her, telling the police 30 times that her attacker was dead. By the time a senior police officer authorised the police and ambulance crew to go into the house Loraine was dead. A pathologist at her Inquest said that if she had been treated immediately, she had a 98% chance of survival. Loraine`s family say police management of the incident was negligent, that they should have acted on her news that her attacker was dead; they could have taken action in any case to establish if he was still a threat, that their reaction time was too slow and that their handling of the incident was inept. There was no inquiry and no public accountability. There certainly was no reckoning; public or otherwise.
So where does that leave the question of Professor Jason Arday? I want to be careful. An inquiry is not a substitute for facts, and it should not be treated as a moral reflex that follows every public tragedy. But there are obvious questions about institutions, power, race and the cumulative effect of sustained scrutiny and attack. If the concern is that his death cannot be understood purely as an individual event — if the concern is that universities, media organisations and other institutions may have produced an outcome through their structures and conduct that no one of them is willing to own — then one can see why calls for a public inquiry arise.
The strongest argument for an inquiry into Professor Arday’s death is therefore not that it would provide instant justice. It would not. Nor is it that it would necessarily establish simple legal blame. Inquiries cannot determine criminal or civil liability. Its strongest argument would be that it could ask, in public and with compulsory powers which will undoubtedly be needed, how institutional decisions were made; what was known; what warnings were ignored; how race may have shaped the framing of allegations, the treatment of vulnerability, or the willingness to allow a human being to be publicly dismantled; and whether the systems that were meant to exercise care instead intensified harm.
The strongest argument against an inquiry is that it may become an elaborate form of delay. If ministers announce one while declining to take any immediate action available to them; if disclosure is allowed to become a war of attrition; if the terms of reference are drawn so narrowly that larger institutional culture is screened out; if those most affected are denied real ownership of the process; if the result is another report met with ritual thanks and weak implementation — then the inquiry will not be justice. It will be a holding device.
This is where Hillsborough Law matters. Once fully in force, it could alter the landscape of inquiries in England and Wales in ways that are both practical and profound. It would impose a statutory duty of candour and assistance on public authorities and officials. It would shift disclosure from reactive to proactive. It would allow chairs to issue compliance directions. It would increase accountability at senior leadership level and create possible criminal consequences for obstructive or misleading conduct. In practical terms, its greatest effect would likely be on disclosure, and on reducing the inequality that so often defines these processes: bereaved families and survivors on one side, the information-holding state on the other.
I do not suggest that Hillsborough Law would solve everything. It would not solve the problem of governments failing to implement recommendations after the headlines pass. It would not remove every argument about scope, privilege or cost. But it might shorten or sharpen inquiries by making concealment harder and by requiring public authorities to treat candour not as a strategic option but as a legal duty. For victims who have learned, over decades, that the first battle is often simply to obtain the documents, that would be no small reform.
My own view, after years of these cases, is that an inquiry into Professor Jason Arday’s death is an absolute necessity but it would be worth having only if we are honest about what it can and cannot do. It can create a public reckoning. It can compel disclosure and testimony. It can expose whether institutions behaved with fairness, care and equality, or whether they reproduced the old pattern in which a Black life is first exceptionalised, then burdened with symbolic weight, and finally abandoned to the consequences of institutional conduct. It can give those closest to him a voice and a forum in which recognition is not a courtesy but a right.
But it will be worth having only on conditions. The terms of reference must be wide enough to examine systems, culture and institutional interaction, not merely a narrow chronology. Those most affected must have genuine participation and confidence in the process. Disclosure must be full and early. The inquiry must be prepared to produce interim findings if urgent changes are apparent. And government must not be allowed to treat the announcement of an inquiry as the discharge of its moral duty.
If those conditions cannot be met, then one should be wary. An inquiry without candour, without participation, without urgency and without a serious implementation mechanism is not a reckoning. It is a ceremony of postponement.
But if the question is whether this country still needs public processes in which institutions are made to answer, my answer is yes. I have seen too many occasions on which without that pressure, the truth would simply not have come. The harder answer — and the more honest one — is that truth alone is not enough. A public inquiry into Jason Arday’s death would be meaningful only if it is designed not merely to find out what happened, but to prevent the state and the institutions involved from taking refuge, once again, in delay.
So, please sign the petition. Over 120,000 have signed so far. It’s your turn now.
