PEERS have attacked the government over its “negative” and “contemptuous” response to a House of Lords committee’s findings on public inquiries.

Labour committee member Baron Richard said the coalition had “elevated obfuscation into an art form” in its treatment last year of a report on the Inquiries Act 2005.

The row comes amid continuing anger over interminable delays in the publication of the Chilcot inquiry report into the Iraq war, which has been partly blamed on the need to get responses from those criticised.

Baron Richard said the committee had produced a “serious piece of work and deserved better treatment than it has received from the government.”

He told peers that the attitude of ministers had been “contemptuous, peremptory and an example of how governments shouldn’t behave.”

And the response to the report had been “extraordinarily negative and unhelpful,” he added.

Liberal Democrat Baron Shutt of Greetland, who chaired the committee, said it had produced 33 recommendations and described the government’s response, rejecting 14 of them, as “disappointing.”

One of the key issues examined by the committee was the issuance of warning letters to those criticised in an inquiry report.

The committee said the use of these rules prolonged inquiries by several months.

Former lord chief justice and independent crossbencher Baron Woolf said that, while the letters had a role to play, “we don’t want rigid rules that they have to be served in all circumstances.”

He added: “In many situations it is an unnecessary additional procedure to impose on inquiries.

“But where they can help to achieve justice, then they’ve got to be served.”