When her murder convictions made former neonatal nurse Lucy Letby Britain’s worst child killer on 18 August 2023, front-page headlines cast her as the face of “pure evil”. There was widespread horror that anyone could deliberately harm tiny newborn babies. A growing number of scandals around avoidable deaths in other UK maternity services meant yet another crisis of perinatal care was explosive. The government immediately reached for a politically convenient pressure valve: it announced a public inquiry the very same day.
Last week, three years later, the Thirlwall Inquiry reported. Named after Lady Justice Thirlwall, the Court of Appeal judge who chaired it, it has cost well over £18 million. I fear it joins a long line of UK public inquiries meant to learn lessons from deaths – the inquiries into the Iraq War and weapons of mass destruction, the Bloody Sunday killings in Northern Ireland, the Hillsborough football tragedy – that end up being revisited years later to get to the truth.