Inevitably people will wonder why the inquiry didn’t recommend banning models with a body mass index (BMI) of less than 18, which is where this whole furore began a year ago.

Actually, not taking this step is probably the most courageous aspect of this inquiry. It would have been easy to fall in with Milan and Madrid and it would have shut up people like Dee Doocey, a Liberal Democrat member of the London Assembly who even before it was published, declared the Model Health Inquiry toothless and called on Ken Livingstone to end the Assembly’s funding to London Fashion Week. So far, so predictable.

An out-and-out ban would be futile, not least because the few designers who are hellbent on using skeletal girls always have the option of showing off the official Fashion Week schedule and thereby placing themselves outside the British Fashion Council’s remit and the London Assembly’s financial contribution to LFW. And they would probably wear their self-exile as a badge of honour.

Besides, BMI, like dress sizes, as any woman who has found herself a size 12 in Topshop and an 8 in Marks and Spencer appreciates, is not an absolute indicator of health. A thorough medical check-up, including psychological screening for existing and previous eating disorders is surely a more reliable indicator, and one that the inquiry recommends British model agencies routinely require from all the girls on their books in future, although these would have to be carried out once a month to have any meaning.

The inquiry’s key recommendation, a ban on models under 16, is sound. These young girls, not always chaperoned, increasingly from impoverished Eastern European backgrounds, are among those most vulnerable to the culture of extreme thin-ness that undeniably persists in the fashion world. It’s also, as Baroness Kingsmill says, “profoundly inappropriate that girls under the age of consent should be portrayed as adult women”.

The UK age ban should be straightforward to uphold since it’s still harder to fudge a passport than it is to argue about what constitutes a healthy BMI.

Unfortunately London Fashion Week is small-fry compared with New York, Paris and Milan and arguably wields less influence.

But if the inquiry’s recommendations — which is all they are — seem tame compared with the thundering pronouncements emanating from Milan and Madrid, they are at least more likely to be enforced, especially if all the British agencies sign up to the inquiry’s charter, as expected.

Meanwhile, many industry observers suspect that Milan’s statements amount to little more than cynical posturing. Certainly little has visibly changed on its catwalks.

Anyone looking for overnight transformations here will also be disappointed. Changing perceptions takes much longer than changing laws. The thin culture persists in ballet, acting, the rock and pop worlds and various sports — still, change has to begin somewhere. The question is whether this inquiry will foment it. The fact that it demands zero tolerance to drug-taking and smoking backstage, to which there is already zero legal tolerance, highlights just how difficult it is to regulate people’s behaviour without some kind of draconian surveillance.

Random drug-testing, which the inquiry proposes, would finally send out the right message.

Ultimately this is what this is about — changing perceptions in an industry that has turned a blind eye to exploitative practices until they came to seem normal. This, in the end, will be far more effective than knee-jerk prohibitions. Unfortunately too many politicians only respond to knee-jerkism.

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