In the wake of crises, discontent and demands for change emerge from below. This challenges the longstanding path-dependencies of British politics which reproduce a highly elitist top-down mode of political decision-making. Public inquiries are viewed as helpfully shelving demands for change by “kicking into the long grass”. In this chapter, I show that this view fails to account for the politicising power of inquiry reports. I then trace debates regarding policy reform which occurs after inquiries report their findings and show that governments can accept inquiry findings and then avoid implementing them. This can occur because of a lack of transparency and accountability mechanisms related to inquiry recommendation implementation and because political scrutiny of recommendation implementation plays second fiddle to blame games within political discourse. Finally, I also show that inquiry recommendations themselves tend to depoliticise demands for change by narrowing the possible scope of change to incremental fine-tuning, rather than more systemic change.