Victims and Prisoners Bill

Baroness Sanderson of Welton Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 13th February 2024 Lords Chamber

Your Lordships will have noted that the amendment is predicated on the Government accepting some degree of retrospection in the independent public advocate’s activities, as there may not have been a new major incident within the timeframe. But I hope that the Government will have recognised the imperative not to deprive all those who are victims, and who continue to suffer from previous major incidents, of the support that could be offered by the independent public advocate. I refer again, for example, to the postmasters, the victims of contaminated blood transfusions and the victims of nuclear tests. In those circumstances, I was encouraged—I hope not mistakenly—by the Minister, who, on the previous day in Committee, seemed to indicate that he might be open to looking again at that provision. I hope very much that the Government might accept at least this amendment—although I obviously hope that they will accept all my amendments —because it will put their position to the test. I hope they will not resist that.

[Baroness Sanderson of Welton (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 124A and first to 133ZA, which recommends the review that the noble Lord, Lord Wills, just talked about—a review of the way in which the IPA is working once the office is up and running. I am not always a fan of reviews in legislation, but in this instance it does seem to make sense, given that this is such a ground-breaking role.

As the noble Lord, Lord Wills, has already made clear, it is a position that has taken a long time to get off the ground. It is fair to say that officials have grappled with the role and what it will look like in practice. Having originally proposed a panel that would be activated in the event of a disaster, the Government have now agreed on a single standing advocate. This is welcome news. As my noble friend the Minister knows, I think the IPA may need the power to compel evidence, so I firmly agree with Amendment 124A, which would allow the Secretary of State to grant the IPA the ability to establish a fact-finding inquiry, with the right to see all relevant documentation.

The noble Lord, Lord Wills, has done this brilliantly, so I will just quickly add that this is central to the role of the IPA given the dissembling that lies at the heart of pretty much every disaster, as institutions still seek to protect themselves over and above those who have been wronged. I completely agree with the noble Lord’s point that such a power would not put the IPA in competition with others but would be a cost-effective triage. He makes an interesting point about the difference and the fact that perhaps we have not had a repeat of the Hillsborough Independent Panel inquiry. One reason for that comes from victims themselves, which we saw with Lucy Letby: we must have a statutory public inquiry, because that is the only way we can compel witnesses and evidence. As the noble Lord, Lord Wills, has said, we go down the road of these very expensive public inquiries when perhaps, with the powers that he suggests only being switched on by the Secretary of State in the right instance, we could avoid some of that.

To mention them again, although the sub-postmasters are not a group of people I have worked with personally, I watched the programme along with everybody else. I cannot help thinking about that moment when they all said, “Oh, I thought I was the only one. I wrote and they all said that I was the only one”. At that point, there were 200 or 300 of them. If the IPA had existed, could they have gone to the IPA and said, “We’ve formed this group of 300 of us and this has happened to us”? If the IPA had the power to write to the Post Office and say, “Can you please tell me how many complaints you have had about the Horizon system?”, could so much pain and damage have been stopped? The IPA would have had the power to get that answer in a way that they did not because, as usual, the dissembling meant that they could not get to the information.

Along with the noble Lord, Lord Wills, I realise that the Government think otherwise about the power to compel evidence, despite the views of victims, survivors and families—who are all in favour of such a power. For now, I accept that we shall have to agree to disagree, but I will come back to Amendment 133ZA. I hope we might agree that what we have just been talking about all shows just how complex this new role is. It will take some time to work out exactly how the IPA can do its work. Therefore, in this instance a review is a very good idea because we should not underestimate what an important role this is. If you had relatives at Hillsborough, lived in Grenfell Tower, were infected with HIV or hepatitis, or were a sub-postmaster, and had the IPA existed at that point, the IPA was your one chance, the only person in the system entirely there for you.