The judge in charge of the Bloody Sunday inquiry says the completion of the final report will be delayed by up to another year, blaming the length and complexity of the material involved.

Lord Saville of Newdigate, who is a law lord, told The Times that his final report will run to some 4,000 pages.

“This will require several months’ worth of editing,” he said, “even after we hand over the final parts of the report to the publishers.”

Lord Saville, who is working on the mammoth report from his home in Surrey, said: “I am extremely sorry that we got the estimate wrong. The reason is that it is so huge. But we will finish it.”

Times Archive 1972: Thirteen civilians killed as soldiers storm the Bogside

Civil rights leaders taking part in the march accused troops of indiscriminate firing

• As the smoke clears in Derry the question is: who fired first?

Related Links

• Anger over Bloody Sunday report delay

• 900 witnesses, 20 million words of evidence

• Profile: Lord Saville of Newdigate

He said that critics of the delay, which will mean that he and his fellow tribunal members have taken nearly five years just writing the report, should wait until they see the final product “to see if it can be said that we should not have taken as long as we did.” If they then wished to criticise, that was fair enough, he said.

Lord Saville, 72, who was appointed to conduct the Bloody Sunday inquiry in 1998, shortly after being promoted to the House of Lords, said that he and the two tribunal members were working six days a week to complete the report. “I am working much harder than I ever did as a barrister,” he said.

The inquiry into the events in Londonderry on January 30, 1972, when 14 people died and another 14 were injured after a civil rights march, when British troops opened fire, was set up by Tony Blair. Lord Saville said that about a quarter of the final report had gone to the publishers and he anticipated that the entire report would have gone by spring next year. He said: “It is quite spectacularly complex.”

The inquiry, which is expected to break all records in terms of length and cost and has so far run up a bill of more than £182 million, had involved 700 days of evidence, Lord Saville said. Final submissions by counsel ran to 14,500 pages, which in turn made reference to tens of thousands of pages of oral evidence that had to be read together with the final submissions.

He said that no decision had been made as to what form the final report would take or whether there would be an executive summary. The material was so complex that any summary might not be able to do justice to it.

He added that the tribunal certainly had views but the drafts were constantly being looked at and adjusted, “simply because they are so complex”.

Lord Saville said that a conclusion coming down one side or the other was far too simplistic.

He will have spent 11 years on the inquiry and the report by the time it is published at the end of next year. He denied that he was depressed or felt overburdened by the size of the task still ahead of him: “It has taken an enormous amount of time but we are definitely getting there.”

Times Recommends

• Milk: do we need a dairy godmother?
• DIY: the women doing it for themselves
• First double portrait of Princes unveiled