£14m Care Inquiry legal costs remain a mystery

Wednesday 10 January 2018

Ministers say that they cannot provide a breakdown of exactly how around £14million of taxpayers' money was spent on lawyers’ fees as part of the Independent Jersey Care Inquiry - because it would take too long to work out.

At its conclusion in July last year, costs of the Inquiry, which was chaired by UK QC Frances Oldham, totalled more than £23million.

But more than half of that sum was spent on legal costs.

An Express Freedom of Information (FOI) request revealed that £13,886,452 had been spent on lawyers’ fees by November last year. The number included expenditure by the Inquiry Panel, as well as States departments, witnesses and a number of “interested parties.”

However, the proportion of the £13.8million spent on legal administration, travel and other expenses remains unclear. The names of the law firms involved and their respective hourly rates have also not been confirmed. 

Pictured: A States spokesperson said that a full breakdown of the costs would not be possible because it would take too long to assess all invoices.

When asked for a breakdown by Express, the States responded that providing “the level of detail requested would require examination of many individual legal bills” and would therefore be impossible under the FOI law, which stipulates that the States should spend no longer than 12.5 hours on collating information.

The budget for the inquiry, which largely focused on child abuse, was originally set at £6million. In 2015, politicians approved additional funding of £9million. At its closure, costs were more than four times the original budget.

During the course of the Inquiry, the Panel heard evidence from more than 450 people who had lived in the care system, saw more than 200 witnesses and considered more than 136,000 documents.

London-based global law firm Eversheds Sutherland – one of the world’s largest – were employed to assist with their work following a tender process. 

In February 2017, it was revealed that the Panel had spent £10.5million on “fees and expenses” – a figure including their legal costs. An additional £1.1million was spent on “other costs”, which included legal costs for witnesses.

Pictured: The Independent Jersey Care Inquiry Panel - Frances Oldham QC, Alyson Leslie and Professor Sandy Cameron CBE.

The States also incurred substantial legal fees of £3.4million. This spanned The Chief Minister’s Department, Health and Social Services, Home Affairs, and Education, Sport and Culture. The States Law Officer’s Department, meanwhile, generated a bill of £1.2million.

Given that the inquiry was set up to probe governmental failings, the States of Jersey were not able to interfere with or scrutinise the work or expenditure of the Panel to maintain the integrity of its findings.

Speaking in the States Assembly in 2015, Treasury Minister Senator Alan Maclean explained: “I think at the very heart of the problems that we see before us in terms of controlling costs have been the fact that quite rightly this has been an independent inquiry set up; independence is obviously critically important. It meant that there has been a reluctance, quite rightly, for anybody to be seen to be interfering for risk of that being misconstrued in a way that would be very negative for the outcome of the inquiry itself.”