Public inquiries related to product liability do vital work but are undermined by a lack of accountability & commitment to action, as Sarah Moore, Stuart Warmington & Lily Parmar explain
- The UK has a robust culture of instigating inquiries, but it is less clear whether their recommendations are acted upon.
- Claimants in high-profile liability scandals often have to campaign for years.
- Greater monitoring and reporting could help redress this accountability gap.
On 5 May 2023, the World Health Organization declared an end to the coronavirus as a ‘global health emergency’. Nevertheless, as we move into our second post-pandemic summer, COVID-19 remains omnipresent in the headlines as the public hearings for the UK’s COVID-19 inquiry get underway. This inquiry is set to be one of the biggest and most expensive in UK history. As the inquiry chair Baroness Hallett highlighted in her opening statement, its purpose is to enable the government to ‘learn lessons to inform preparations for future pandemics’.
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