A couple of months back Forest Hill School in Lewisham called a meeting of parents and teachers to discuss an over-spending meltdown that has left basic supplies running short and teachers out on strike.

The headmaster has by all accounts done a fine job staunching the bleeding. At the meeting he did his best to reassure parents, although one offhand remark raised some eyebrows. Asked why Lewisham council is unable to go above and beyond and step in to ease the £1m-plus cash shortfall the head listed the council’s various financial burdens: austerity, an ongoing housing crisis and, of course, “the Millwall inquiry”.

Extraordinary demands indeed, albeit not all of them have been imposed from outside. The Dyson – or “Millwall” – Inquiry was called by the council itself in February. In effect the inquiry is a due diligence exercise on work the council has already done, or should have done, in relation to its handling of the New Bermondsey “regeneration” scheme: a project that involves, among other things, seizing public land, some of it occupied by Millwall FC, and selling it on to offshore-registered developers called Renewal.

The Dyson inquiry will cost the local taxpayer an estimated half a million pounds. Resources may be scarce. But when it comes to inquiries, legal teams and the urge to rehabilitate troubled luxury housing schemes it seems the poor old south-east London money tree really can still shed its desiccated fruits.

Serious questions have been asked about the New Bermondsey project by the council’s own scrutiny committee, led by the estimable Alan Hall, and indeed by this newspaper. Most alarming for fans of league clubs of similar scale, the scheme would, according to Millwall owner John Berylson, threaten the club’s future in its home of the last 107 years. “The fact is if you’re a renter and your landlord wants you to go, you’re probably going to end up going. You can’t be some place where your landlord wants you gone,” Berylson said last week, a statement of Millwall’s position some will no doubt continue to dispute or dismiss as scaremongering.

The inquiry is expected to reveal its findings in a report before the end of the year. Witnesses are currently giving evidence.

The future of Millwall’s home has become a campaigning issue before the Lewisham mayoralty elections. Photograph: TGSPhoto/Rex Shutterstock

At the end of which it is worth pointing out that the inquiry itself is a puzzling affair. Lord Dyson may be a hugely respected, impartial and dizzyingly able former master of the rolls. It is important to point out that this is not a public inquiry with judicial force. This is in reality a report commissioned and paid for by the council’s executive, and operating within a strictly defined framework. It is a private inquiry.

The Dyson inquiry has no power to demand or seize documents. It cannot peer behind the veil of offshore secrecy. It will never tell us, for example, who really owns Renewal, or who Renewal’s ultimate beneficiaries are. All of the evidence involved will be heard privately and kept from the public gaze.

Meanwhile councillor Hall, the most informed dissenting voice inside the council, has not been granted any assistance with legal advice by his employers in preparing his own statement to Dyson. Hall is still considering whether it is advisable to expose himself to the process without legal help. This is a seriously limiting move right from the start.

Simultaneously Renewal and Lewisham council are behind a costly legal action to prevent Lewisham’s own unredacted due diligence report into the scheme from being released under a freedom of information request. It seems bizarre this document would not be made available as part of the inquiry.

In the middle of which two questions continue to present themselves. Firstly, what is the point of this inquiry and whom does it serve? And secondly, what can it reasonably be expected to discover?

The second of these is the most obviously confusing. The main questions here have always seemed to be essentially political. Is it right for Lewisham’s cabinet to award half a million pounds of public money to a charity of which its mayor is a director, and which exists as an arm of a private development?

Is it right for a local authority to enter into an agreement over the sale of public land with an opaque offshore developer?

The inquiry feels like a way of calling a ceasefire in a process that had become deeply troubling for Lewisham council

These are not issues of criminality or corruption. They are more a matter of what the public can expect rather than demand from its elected officials. Is it right that the last Labour mayor of Lewisham, a founding director of the developer Renewal, has already had the opportunity to make a profit out of this scheme by selling his own shares in Renewal once the New Bermondsey scheme had been given time to brew? Does this behaviour raise concerns among Labour voters and local people? Does it give the impression of public officials being seen to be held to the very highest standards?

These are issues of legitimate public interest. But it is hard to see how they can be settled by an inquiry led by a former master of the rolls who will naturally not be able to make political or moral judgments on these issues.

The inquiry’s terms of reference do include a mention of looking at “the propriety or otherwise of the behaviour of all Members and officers”, whether codes of conduct and due diligence were followed and whether the council was misled. Evidence to this end will have to be provided, on trust and without the power to compel, by those involved. And as for the precise details of propriety, protocol, codes of conduct? Answers on a postcard please.

Similarly, it is hard to see many issues of fact that demand a judge-led inquiry.

As previously detailed in these pages it is, for example, clear that Sport England has not “pledged” £2m in funding for Surrey Canal Sports Foundation, the charitable company at the heart of the developer-led scheme. As of 2014 there is not even a current application in train. And yet the link with Sport England has been trumpeted in a PR-ish fashion in various public documents.

This is not an issue of illegality or corruption. It is about assertions made, facts presented as a fait accompli and the public’s right to understand more fully and take a judgment on the actions of people involved. It will be a point of interest for anyone persuaded of significant Sport England backing for this project. These people include Lewisham councillors, Millwall supporters, voters and those being evicted from homes and businesses.

Questions raised go to the heart of a wider story of gentrification, cleansing of poorer, more established communities

What is not clear, again, is why it is considered necessary to conduct an inquiry into this. Had there been a real issue of fact here all parties would perhaps now be sitting in an actual courtroom. Instead, this is being debated in an informal inquiry staged at Lewisham council’s considerable expense.

So why is it happening? Most obviously, the inquiry feels like a way of calling a ceasefire in a process that had become deeply troubling for Lewisham council.

The open questioning of the scheme by pretty much everybody outside and indeed even within the council’s own divided cabinet had made its progress unsustainable.

The inquiry offers breathing space. Some have even dismissed it from the start as a fig leaf, a way of saying: we have looked at some questions and answered those questions so on we go as before.

More simply it is clear Lewisham council and Renewal’s directors remain extremely unhappy at the unaccustomed scrutiny applied to their dealings. The chairman of the Surrey Canal Sport Foundation, Steve Norris, has threatened the Guardian with the prospect of legal action over its coverage, only to admit, to his apparent frustration, there was nothing that actually warranted it.

Norris has even suggested the Guardian investigates whether this correspondent is “in the pay” of Millwall FC, a suggestion so ludicrous it bears repetition only as an insight into the calibre of some of those involved in this affair.

No doubt all parties on the receiving end of unwanted scrutiny will use the inquiry to construct their own narrative around some uncomfortable facts. Those who have raised concerns, including the Guardian, other newspapers, Millwall Football Club and Lewisham’s own councillors will be accused of having some hidden agenda or personal gripe.

And yet, beyond this, there are issues worthy of examination. The questions raised go to the heart of a wider story of urban gentrification, the cleansing of older, poorer, more established communities as the gleaming high rises march in. Set against this is the close relationship between local government and developers, particularly in London where financial stakes are so high. The public expectation is of complete transparency and the highest possible standard of independence. In reality there is a great deal of crossover in personnel over time, and in some cases relationships that might raise concerns with some.

Millwall fans make their views clear on the CPO last season. Photograph: ProSports/Rex Shutterstock

In the meantime the real story continues to roll along elsewhere. Millwall’s struggle to retain a foothold in its own historical backyard will remain a very modern tale of similar forces at work around the country, pegged out here around a football club. Behind this the Lewisham mayoral election looms. The local Labour party is currently selecting its own shoo-in candidate at next year’s ballot for what is a position of rare budgetary and executive power. Millwall is suddenly a campaigning issue, football is suddenly a political football. All five nominated candidates have made their views plain on the New Bermondsey CPO. Hall, who spoke out against the land-grab right from the start, has the backing of Millwall supporters, who do not forget a friend. Hall was credited with “saving” the club by Berylson this week. He has significant backing on the left of the party, has called for greater transparency generally and would make for a progressive and reforming mayor should he get the nomination.

Brenda Dacres, a local ward councillor, has also been supportive of Millwall and sceptical of the CPO scheme. Damien Egan voted in favour of the Millwall CPO in cabinet and supported it publicly, but altered his position at the last to powerful and irrevocable opposition over affordable housing targets and Renewal’s mysterious corporate structure. Councillor Paul Bell, another candidate, has also opposed the CPO in public.

This just leaves Paul Maslin, who denies having described himself as “The Renewal Candidate”, but who openly supports reinstating the Millwall CPO and running the beached Renewal scheme as it stands.

Maslin is an old friend and associate of Dave Sullivan, the ex-mayor who was a founding director of Renewal. Maslin denies, with some justification, that this suggests any partiality on his part. But it is material to his own status as the only mayoral candidate closely associated with the old guard at the council.

Alarmingly for Millwall supporters and concerned local residents, Maslin has also voiced what is no doubt a shared opinion in those circles, remaining convinced that to continue with the hugely unpopular scheme is the only way forward. Albeit most of the reasons given are simply to do with the costs of backing out; and of breaking the impasse as two central parties, Millwall and Renewal, remain at odds.

Meanwhile, the world continues to turn. Forest Hill School will no doubt eventually right itself with the council’s support.

Lord Dyson will fulfil his brief as far as humanly possible. And for all the best intentions of most of those involved, Millwall’s fans will continue to fear, with some justification, that the battle for The Den is far from over.