Public Office (Accountability) Bill: Exclusion

Baroness Levitt Excerpts

Thursday 26th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice (Baroness Levitt) (Lab)]

My Lords, it is customary to begin by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, for securing this debate, but I am sure she would agree that I should start by paying tribute to the victims of the Hillsborough disaster and their families. In doing this, I make it clear that the victims and bereaved must always be front and centre of the Government’s mind as the Bill makes its long overdue way through Parliament.

I hope your Lordships will understand what I mean when I say that the Bill is not just about justice for Hillsborough victims and families, and those of the other disasters; it determines what kind of a society we are. Do we protect vested interests, or do we believe in the importance of rights of and protections for our fellow citizens as individuals? To that extent, I entirely understand the points made, very forcefully, by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, and my noble friend Lord Knight.

The noble Baroness and I had a very short discussion yesterday when she explained her concerns to me. I am grateful to her for that. I hope she knows that my objective in this matter is not to make partisan points or to be stubborn about legislation but to make sure that, as we go through the process of introducing a new law, we get it right. By “right”, I mean that the law captures the behaviour that we think is so egregious that it merits being criminalised while not trespassing on other important issues, which will include convention rights. By securing today’s debate, the noble Baroness and all the other Members of your Lordships’ House who have spoken have given the Government food for thought, and I have treated everybody’s contributions as, in effect, being those of critical friends.

The offence of misleading the public is a brand new offence contained in the Public Office (Accountability) Bill. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, said, your Lordships will have the opportunity to scrutinise it fully when it is sent to us from the other place. My intention today is to explain the policy reasoning behind the Government’s decision to limit the offence to the Executive rather than extend it to all MPs and Peers. To do this, I need briefly to outline what the Bill in general, and this clause in particular, intend to do.

The Government are clear that what happened following the Hillsborough disaster must never happen again. In that case, police lied and changed witness statements to protect their reputations. Bereaved families from Hillsborough, and too many other examples over many years, faced an inquest process with no funding for legal representation. All of that was underpinned by a lack of a duty of candour. The Bill contains a powerful new package of measures to address these failings and others, such as the infected blood and Horizon scandals.

As part of the measure, the Bill creates not one but four new criminal offences, and they fall into two groups. There is plainly some level of misunderstanding about this. That was articulated most clearly by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton; I owe him an apology because, in a recent letter on the Crime and Policing Bill, I addressed him as “Lord Young of Action”, although perhaps he will not have minded too much.

The first group of these four offences includes two offences to replace the common-law offence of misconduct in public office, which will be repealed. The first of those new offences is committing seriously improper acts and the second is breaching the duty to prevent death or serious injury. These new offences broadly replicate the effect of the common-law offence, and they have a very wide reach. They cover a much broader range of behaviour than the kind that was seen at Hillsborough; for example, misconduct in public office has in the past been used to prosecute for offences such as corruption in public office—that is what these two new offences are intended to replicate.

We are replacing the old common-law offence because there was a lack of certainty about it. One of the issues with it was the lack of a list of those to whom the law applied. To deal with that, those two new offences do have a list. Both those two very broad offences do apply to MPs and Peers, as well as to a number of other public office holders, including judges.

Secondly, we have created another two new offences, which are completely separate from the old misconduct in public office offence. They were designed specifically to deal with a narrower range of circumstances and to deal with the situation that has arisen in these large-scale disasters. These two new offences are: first, a breach of the new duty of candour; and, secondly, the offence of misleading the public contained in Clause 11. It is only the latter offence, out of the four new ones, with which we are concerned today.

As I have already said, this offence is designed to be much narrower than the ones designed to replace misconduct in public office. It was designed specifically with what happened at Hillsborough in the front of our minds, and I will explain the reason for that. As the scale of the disaster at Hillsborough was becoming apparent, the police lied about its cause, saying that Liverpool fans had broken into the stadium. However, as we now know, and as the Taylor inquiry uncovered, in fact the main reason for the disaster was the failure of police control.

This new offence is aimed squarely at those who intentionally or recklessly aim to mislead the public and cover up the truth. It is intended to capture only the most serious instances of public officials or authorities misleading the public. An example might be a chief executive of a hospital instructing the staff to lie about a major incident to avoid criticism of the hospital. It is not intended to apply to instances of accidental or inadvertent misleading.

To reassure the noble Lord, Lord Young, prosecutions cannot be brought without the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions, specifically to avoid vexatious private prosecutions. The noble Lord mentioned judicial review, but the doorway to a judicial review is a narrow one—it is a very restricted set of circumstances and is subject to a permission stage from the High Court.

The Government thought very carefully about to whom this offence should apply. It applies to public officials and public authorities, so it captures those working in government and the wider public sector who take decisions on behalf of the state. That includes Ministers and other politicians in executive roles, but not MPs and Peers.

Our thinking was this: Parliament has a unique role in our society. Parliamentarians are responsible for legislating, scrutinising legislation and holding the Government to account. In addition, MPs are responsible for representing their constituents. However, individual MPs and Peers do not directly take decisions on behalf of the state, nor do they have access to the kind of government information that would be available to Ministers. For that reason, we have come to the conclusion that it would not be appropriate to extend the offences in the Bill to all MPs and Peers—and they are not extended to judges either. We have the wide group of offences designed to replace misconduct in public office, which applies to Back-Benchers, the Opposition and the judiciary, and this narrow offence designed to cover those who take decisions.

Of course, the Government agree that misleading the public in any capacity is not acceptable, and there should be consequences for parliamentarians who do so, but this new offence is not the appropriate vehicle for regulating political speech. Parliament has its own arrangements for ensuring accuracy and truthfulness in proceedings, including processes for determining whether MPs have misled the other place, and it is for the House of Lords Procedure and Privileges Committee to consider any instances where a Member of your Lordships’ House is alleged to have misled the House. This reflects the important principle that parliamentary proceedings are rightly privileged and cannot be questioned in a court of law. Each House is responsible for determining the right sanctions when it is alleged that someone has misled the House.

Members of both Houses must also act in accordance with the Nolan principles in all their public functions, and the very high standards expected of public office holders, conducting themselves with honesty and integrity. It is for each House to determine the procedures for investigating and sanctioning those who break the rules. The Government are confident that the scope of the new offence, combined with the existing arrangements and the codes of conduct for parliamentarians, strike the right balance between capturing the most serious wrongdoing while not infringing the tried and tested procedures that govern all noble Lords and all those in the other place to ensure that we conduct ourselves to the highest standards.

This has been an interesting and important debate and I will of course meet the noble Baroness, any lawyer she wants to bring with her and indeed any other Members of your Lordships’ House who would like to discuss this further.