I still think we need a public inquiry if we are to stop this happening again. On the not keeping research records point, the official regulators of research have been aware of the area at least since the Newsnight reports by Deborah Cohen and Hannah Barnes because they gave statements at the time that were broadcast.
Also the official regulators of doctors will have had it raised to them about how health professionals are involved in experimenting on kids and not keeping records with an expectation of publishing, (as they would do in actual legally regulated research).
Those official bodies may or may not have had enough legal powers to do anything to require giving PBs to kids to be considered research and treated as research, or to stop it happening if it already going on, harms were suspected and then confirmed. That state of affairs warrants a public investigation,
If the new law only covers PBs that isn’t enough to safeguard all kids. In this case it might be PBs devastating the lives of kids but currently or in future it could be some other kind of situation that is going on, with adults increasingly concerned, a vested interest group promoting it for political or financial gain, and seemingly nobody having powers to stop it until over a decade has passed. Which delay I would say is due to fears of legal culpability and political loss of face by those in power who have presided over injustice.
I’d say probably vaping in kids or kids use of social media is a different sort of brewing public health scandal with more not being done to stop it legally for financial and political reasons.
But there will be other examples similar to PBs in future (if there aren’t already happening) where the same drivers are there on kids and on the professional people around them and the medical establishment is used to facilitate harm.
Ditto NHS policies need a public enquiry to look at the role of lobby groups in obscuring the terminology the NHS has been using. The way the NHS has been using normalising language around adult medical and surgical transition may have encouraged kids to consider their problems in terms of gender identity as a solution In the first place, and then considering blockers as s reversible pause which was how it was described.
And the role of school policies needs investigating and of course the unethical leading behaviours of the TRA charities who reportedly coached kids in what to say in the clinic to get medication like PBs. So only a public inquiry can really do all that and protect children from medicalised experimentation of different kinds in the future.