Inquiring into disasters: law, politics and blame

A range of different institutions comprise the system of public inquiry into deaths and disasters in the United Kingdom. This paper analyses the roles these institutions play in the investigation of cause, in the allocation of blame and in the formal construction of those events. It will become clear that there is no 'system' as such, that the inquiries may or may not be 'in public', that the legal institutions of England and Wales differ from those in Scotland, and that the formal attribution of blame through the legal process is complex, contingent and variable. The structures and institutions which are described are not peculiar to disasters (although they usually involve a 'disaster' for one or other of the parties). Here I have assumed that an event has taken place in which multiple deaths have occurred more or less simultaneously, for which there is not an obvious human agent as its immediate cause. Although increasingly we question causal aetiologies so that even a gun massacre, a so-called 'random' killing, may be traced to social causes such as family background or to the failure of regulation such as licensing controls, I have not included these 'single agent' events in my discussion. Following the introduction, the first section covers the diverse public inquiry system and police investigations. These are characterised by their discretionary operation reflecting a flexibility in institutional response as well as disclosing some confusion of purpose. The coronial inquest system, whose sphere of operation is then analysed, is also characterised by discretion in relation to procedure, although not in relation to the requirement to hold an inquest. This section concludes with a discussion of Home Office proposals to streamline the inquiry and inquest process. Legal sequelae of disasters in the form of civil suits for compensation and prosecutions on criminal charges are described in the final sections. Proposals for a new offence of corporate killing are also analysed here