Establishing independent commissioners is much more than a tick-box exercise

Governments establish commissioner and advocate roles as a means to signal their readiness to address the interests of neglected or underrepresented groups, but creating these roles alone won’t solve the problems that governments want to address.  

Building on previous research about how commissioners can have the most impact, the IfG recently facilitated a roundtable of past and present commissioners. The discussion revealed that governments often don’t have a clear idea of what they want to achieve by establishing new commissioners, and that once established, commissioners do not receive enough support and resources to succeed.  

Commissioners are high profile, influential public figures who can challenge the government

By establishing commissioners, governments are creating high profile public figures with influence, appointed to support survivors of major incidents and state failures like the Hillsborough disaster and the Grenfell Tower fire. 

While commissioners generally do not have binding powers to compel the government to respond to their recommendations and reports, they do have important soft power. The moral weight of the voices and experiences that commissioners represent can be a powerful tool to push for change.  

Commissioners can, if they need, choose to use this platform to voice public criticism of the government – and governments should recognise that failure to act on that criticism can lead to a breakdown in the relationship between the commissioner and the government. Ultimately, this risks losing the trust of the very people the government was aiming to help by appointing a commissioner in the first place.

Government needs to think more carefully about this aspect of the role before establishing commissioners and accept that the independence of commissioners can create an opportunity for change, rather than a situation to avoid. If it is not prepared to address concerns commissioners raise, it would be better not to raise expectations by creating the post in the first place.  

Commissioners need sufficient resources to succeed

Public expectations of commissioners are high, and the individuals themselves are eager to get stuck into the work. But commissioners need to be resourced properly to meet these expectations. Often, commissioners find that their office was not set up properly for them to start the job. Baroness Newlove spoke publicly about her experience of starting as the Victims Commissioner (2012-2019): “I didn’t have a desk, I didn’t have any staff, I was going back to Number 10 saying this is really ludicrous, because I was passionate about this role”.  ⁴ Phillips J, ‘Baroness Newlove: “Nobody should be a statistic – these are human lives”’, PoliticsHome, 20 May 2019, retrieved 12 February 2020, www.politicshome.com/thehouse/article/baroness-newlove-nobod

Sponsor departments must support commissioners to hit the ground running – at the most basic level, this involves giving them a sufficient budget and team of staff. Several commissioners said that the process to recruit external staff was long and arduous, often taking many months, due to the difficulty of securing approval from their sponsor department. This impacts commissioners’ ability to hire people who might have the specialised skills they need to deliver effectively. As well as recruitment problems, commissioners are often not allocated budgets commensurate with the scale of the task, which can restrict what work they take on.  

Commissioners require ongoing engagement from government to maintain credibility

Government tends to establish commissioners as a measure to earn public goodwill in response to an incident, scandal or tragedy. But commissioners require long-term commitment and engagement from government to be credible.

Regular meetings should take place between commissioners and ministers or civil servants from the sponsor department, and government should respond in a timely manner to commissioners’ recommendations and reports. The IfG has previously called for there to be a formal commitment for sponsor departments to respond to commissioners’ reports within a limited time period.

Long-term support is especially important for commissioners who experience ministerial turnover and often straddle the lifespan of different governments, with new ministers perhaps less interested in listening to a commissioner whose role was created by their political opponents. But public money and faith are invested in commissioners, and government must in turn invest in the relationship with those appointed to these important roles.

Creating a commissioner role is an opportunity for the government to work with dedicated public figures to solve thorny and often emotive problems. Rather than hoping they will just make problems go away, ministers need to make sure commissioners are set up to succeed.