Committee evidence: Hillsborough law (Joint Committee on Human Rights)

Thank you, Chair.

I think it is extremely necessary, Chair. With every year that it is not passed, the potential for fresh injustice is there. We can see it in what happens. I could touch on the Manchester Arena inquiry issue in a moment if that would be helpful to the committee.

To go back to the core of the Public Authority (Accountability) Bill, as Bishop Jones has touched on there are two core measures at the heart of it. One is a duty of candour on all public officials and police officers, and the other is the requirement for parity of legal funding that you just heard about. The question that was always in my mind following the second Hillsborough inquest—I posed this question in the House of Commons when I responded across the Floor from the then Home Secretary, Theresa May—was how an entire English city was crying injustice for 20 years, yet nobody in this place, Parliament, appeared to be listening.

A lot could be said in answer to that question, but two reasons for it are the lack of a duty of candour and the lack of parity of funding. The lack of a duty of candour in the first instance allows public authorities to create false narratives and to shift blame on to victims. That is what happens and is still happening. In particular, when those false narratives are amplified through the media, as was the case with the Hillsborough disaster, they become extremely hard to shift.

Going forward to the coronial process, what you then have is those narratives having been established and a courtroom that, as the Bishop has just said, is not a level playing field. You have public authorities spending public money like confetti hiring the best QCs in the land and, in the case of the Hillsborough families, you had families who had to scratch around even to cobble together enough money to get any form of representation.

I brought Margaret Aspinall, the former chair of the Hillsborough family support group, to Parliament in the aftermath of the second inquest. Those who were there might remember that she spoke of having to cash the cheque she had received from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority in respect of her son James to pay for her legal representation. If that is not an abhorrent notion to anyone in Parliament, I honestly do not know what is. There is that ability to create those false narratives, and the core process is not set up to deal with them because one side is massively better represented than the other. That is how these injustices keep repeating and echo through the decades. You could take a long list of things. You can see echoes of Hillsborough in Grenfell.

I mentioned the Manchester Arena inquiry. I set up a voluntary, non-statutory inquiry in the immediate aftermath of the Manchester Arena bomb, under the chairmanship of Lord Kerslake. It is sad to speak of Bob today while we are all still reeling from the news of his passing. He did a phenomenal job for us in Greater Manchester in trying to get the early learning from what happened.

It is hard for me to say that in setting up that inquiry—Bishop Jones had just published his report—I said to the former leadership of Greater Manchester Police, “I want you to put the charter in place for bereaved families here and work as though it is in place”. Even having said that, Greater Manchester Police gave a false account—let me reword that; an inaccurate account—of what happened on the night to the Kerslake inquiry that was left in place for a long time until it was corrected. It was only the statutory inquiry that in the end got to the truth.

My point is that often in those voluntary inquiries there is no duty of candour. Therefore, they can be used in a way that is about taking blame away from the authorities and protecting reputations. It is a very recent example of why the Hillsborough law is needed. You could go further back from Hillsborough to contaminated blood, which is a very live issue at the moment, and to Bloody Sunday. Colleagues in the room will know that there are many more that I could add to that list. This keeps being repeated, and until there is such a law, which we would call the Hillsborough law, I do not think anybody can be certain that these injustices will not carry on occurring into the future.

You are very much getting it right, Chair. That is exactly what happens. It is common for bereaved families at inquests to say that they felt like they were on trial, and that can be inquests involving just one family where there are efforts to portray them as in some way reckless or irresponsible. It is a very common experience, and it happens now.

I think it is compounded by the fact that very little is set out as a requirement in respect of how coronial processes are handled. Things can happen during those processes that are very harmful to the way families feel treated in what are often courtrooms. They enter raw with grief and go into a situation where the worst kind of implications are made and questions asked, often with very little ability to stop that. It is often a retraumatising process for bereaved families.

On your point describing the process of how things happen, can I share with the committee a very recent and real example for me from my time in government? I dealt with the aftermath as Health Secretary of the publication of the Archer report, which was a voluntary report into the infected blood scandal. It reported in 2009, just before I became Health Secretary. I inherited a lot of the unhappiness about that report from victims of the contaminated blood scandal. At the time, I sent letters to those victims, prepared for me by civil servants, that included the phrase that unsafe blood was never knowingly given to haemophiliacs. From my own work since leaving office over the last decade, I have come to the view that those statements were wrong, and I believe the evidence exists in the Department of Health to be clear that those statements were wrong. I said as much at the infected blood inquiry last year.

If a Secretary of State is being given statements that are, let us say, not accurate, what hope is there about something as sensitive as this? That is why a duty of candour, to me anyway, needs to apply right across the board, right the way up to the top, if we are to stop an impulse in the system always to deflect and to push away responsibility. It costs the British state far more to do this than it does to be honest at the very start, not just in the direct costs to the Exchequer but in the human consequences of forcing people bereaved or people harmed through tragedy into the wilderness and the retraumatising effect of that. The human cost of that is incalculable, I would say.

Chair, would you mind if I briefly made a very quick point? I would be grateful if you would allow me to do so. There is a direct consequence of the delay that I want to bring to the committee’s attention. The IOPC—the Independent Office for Police Conduct—is compiling what it calls the final report on Hillsborough. This is meant to be a comprehensive, voluminous document that summarises everything from Operation Resolve, which was the police investigation set up after the Hillsborough Independent Panel report that Bishop Jones chaired. To this point, I have not been able to get an agreement from the IOPC that it will be consistent with the families first principle outlined in Bishop Jones’s charter. It is a great worry to a number of the families that this final report will potentially be published without the families first principle, without a duty of candour, which in many ways could reopen things that the second inquest settled.

The delay could have a very real consequence for the Hillsborough families in respect of that final report. We have grave concerns about how it is being compiled and what will be in it. We believe it is essential that it is shown to the families first before any of it sees the light of day. Yet as we sit here today, that principle has not been agreed to by the IOPC. I just wanted to alert the committee to a real consequence of the delay in the response.