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Mr Henderson, do you also find that to be the case?

Thank you for that.

I think that it would be the public bodies saying to the inquiry, within six to 12 weeks, “This is what we will do”. However, that does not preclude the inquiry taking evidence from people subsequently.

The issue of marking their own homework is important. The reason why the inquiry would still take place, even in those circumstances, is to ensure that the result was not, “Okay, everything is fine—we will just move on”.

The last point that I will make is about capacity. I mentioned earlier that there are 36 senior judges, and if three of them are involved in inquiries, that will have an impact on trials. What do you think is the maximum number of inquiries that can run in Scotland at any one time without derailing the day-to-day delivery of justice in Scotland through ordinary criminal trials?

But that is the dichotomy, is it not? That is why I was talking earlier about opportunity costs, and why a number of other organisations and, indeed, jurisdictions—Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Sweden and Denmark, all of which we will be considering in the next two weeks—do this differently. They do not have the gold standard of a judge, because of the impact on their systems, but they are able to deliver these things in a different way.

Finally, you say in your submission:

“The ECHR advocate that victim groups must have active and meaningful, not illusory, participation in Inquiries.”

I think that we would certainly all agree with that, but when it comes to core participants, what capacity does an inquiry have in that respect? With the Covid inquiry, for example, how many potential victims can there be? A thousand, 10,000, 50,000 or even 100,000 people could theoretically give evidence about the death of a loved one; there will be a lot of overlap and duplication in what they are saying, but they will be giving their own stories. Should there be a limit on that capacity, or can just anyone who wants to be a core participant become one? Obviously, having thousands of people give evidence will not necessarily add to the quality of what is happening. It will just delay things, and cost more.

I suppose that you do not want to say to one person, “You can come to court” and to another, “But you can’t”. However, perhaps you should, if, at the end of the day, they are not saying anything different from what others are saying and if the inquiry is on that sort of scale.

Okay. I am sorry, Michael—did you want to come in?

Thank you very much, Mr McGuire. Before you go, do you have any final points to make, or is there anything that we have not touched on that you want to emphasise at this point? The floor is yours for the last word.

New Zealand and Australia managed to bring in Covid inquiries in the space of a year or so for £5 million, whereas the UK one has already cost more than £200 million and the Scottish one has cost more than £34 million. I have not been aware of any real outcry in Australia and New Zealand that the process was not adequate, although we will be investigating that in the weeks ahead.

I understand what you say about judge-led inquiries being a gold standard, but the fact is that we have only 36 senior judges in Scotland. The Lord President has explained that appointing a judge has a substantial knock-on effect. A judge will sit for 205 sitting days, which equates to 34 criminal trials; currently, three judges are chairing inquiries, which means that there are 10 per cent fewer sitting days to hear cases. That means that other people are being denied justice.

The argument seems to be that the public inquiry subsumes everything else. For example, when there is an inquiry into a health board, the board has to redirect money from hip operations, heart surgery or whatever it happens to be, and that work gets delayed or has to be reduced, because of the impact on funding. The question that I am asking is why public inquiries should be in a situation where there seems to be no limit on the amount that is spent. The Sheku Bayoh inquiry, for example, has cost £51 million so far and counting.

Every other area of the public sector—health boards, local authorities, colleges, all other aspects of justice and so on—has to work within a budget, but you seem to be arguing that all of that goes out the window for a public inquiry, and that it is more important than anything else that happens in the public sector, including having police in the streets and operations being carried out in our hospitals. That seems to be the implication, because I am not hearing any ways in which we can really do things better, other than my suggestion in relation to the secretariat and all that stuff.

But hold on—you are saying that there should not really be any financial limit. There is no other area of the public sector that I am aware of that has an unlimited budget. I suppose that you could say that welfare is demand led but, other than that, everyone else has a specific budget that they have to adhere to.