I noted in the Introduction a convention whereby people inside an inquiry do not tell people outside about anything that was said or is being done. A senior civil servant explained to me another convention, one that constrains panel members after, not during, an inquiry. It is that the people who write recommendations should not be involved in the implementation of them. The reason he gave was that recommendations need to be implemented by people who will not be biased by having been involved in writing them. I explained this convention to a senior businessman and he fell about laughing. He was adamant that he would never waste the time and money invested in the person who writes his reports without it being part of the contract for the author to give a certain amount of time to supervising the implementation.

I had rather hoped that this convention was already on its way out in 1999, at the end of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry. I already had one set of recommendations to implement: the 60 proposed by the Runnymede Trust’s Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia, whose report had been launched by Jack Straw in October 1997. Add to these the 22 recommendations of the David Bennett Inquiry and the 70 recommendations from the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, and the total of 152 is enough to last me for the rest of my lifetime. It never occurred to me that I might not be involved in implementation. These final reflections provide ideas that I hope will be implemented with or without me.

Better access to inquiry archives

For me, the most frustrating story which cries out for an explanation is the absence from public scrutiny of the transcripts, the correspondence files and the rest of the archive for more than five years. I do not buy the explanations that point to civil service lethargy. The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry was not a ‘quick-fix’ little investigation into a distant corner of a government department’s activities. It was one of the biggest and one of the most public inquiries into one of the most significant institutions in the country – the Metropolitan Police Service.

The Inquiry was initiated in a blaze of publicity by the Home Secretary.