Local Inquiries and Council House Rents in Scotland 1958–71

Academic discussion of public inquiries in recent years has neglected the particular political nature of a number of them. A full-length book by R. E. Wraith and G. B. Lamb on the subject of Public Inquiries as an Instrument of Government neglects the element ‘instrument of government’ in favour of assessing the range of uses to which governments put the instrument. Wraith and Lamb do indeed note ‘... inquiries perform the very important political function of exposure: in several cases ... the usefulness of inquiry provisions [in legislation] lies not in their use but in the fact that they are there, as a discouragement to potentially obstructive authorities or individuals. By the same token, the fact that a Minister may order an inquiry into anything he chooses, and thus expose hitherto unpublicised affairs to scrutiny, gives him a weapon which has political as well as administrative uses. On occasion, too, inquiries may serve other political purposes—by testing the strength of opposition, by giving independent sanction to political decisions, and even at times by deferring difficult or controversial decisions’. However, Wraith and Lamb note that ‘for the most part inquiries are not affected by such considerations

Economic rent · Economics · Element (criminal law · Government (linguistics · Law and economics · Legislation · Legislature · Opposition (politics · Political science · Politics · Scrutiny · Sociology · Law · Public Administration · Scottish History and National Identity