Victims and Prisoners Bill

Lord Bishop of Lincoln Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 30th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I am speaking to Amendment 113 on the duty of candour in place of my noble friend Lord Ponsonby and with the support of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester.

I took the time to read the reasons why the Minister did not want us to proceed with this in Committee. I remind the noble Earl that we agreed about the duty of candour in 2014 when we put it on the statute book, in, I suspect, the very large Bill of the now noble Lord, Lord Lansley, on the reorganisation of the NHS, or one that followed shortly after. The whole House agreed that the duty of candour was an important matter within the NHS, and it has become part of the culture of our NHS. I should perhaps declare an interest as a non-executive director of the Whittington Hospital and part of its governance structure.

This amendment seeks to extend that duty to all public organisations—I thank Inquest and others for their briefings—to cover those operating across all public services. This has been Labour policy for some considerable time. Inquest believes, as we do, that there is an urgent need to introduce a duty of candour for those operating across all public services. A duty of candour would place a legal requirement on organisations to approach public scrutiny, including inquiries and inquests into state-related deaths, in a candid and transparent manner. We are talking about major incidents here, so this is very important. This duty would enable public servants and others delivering state services to carry out their role diligently, while empowering them to flag dangerous practices that risk lives.

In Committee, the Minister said that he thought this could

“give rise to many difficult and conflicting views, making the whole process almost impossible to manage and drawing civil servants into conflict with each other and their employers”.—[Official Report, 26/2/24; col. 819.]

It seems to me that a duty of candour does exactly the opposite: it actually allows for a transparent discussion about what might have gone wrong.

I am not going to go into any more detail, because we had a very good discussion about this in Committee. However, Justice’s report When Things Go Wrong found that

“In both inquests and inquiries, lack of candour and institutional defensiveness on the part of State and corporate interested persons and core participants are invariably cited as a cause of further suffering and a barrier to accountability”.


If noble Lords think back to Hillsborough and other inquiries, how true that statement is. That is why this is important.

Bishpop James Jones concluded that South Yorkshire Police’s

“repeated failure to fully and unequivocally accept the findings of independent inquiries and reviews has undoubtedly caused pain to the bereaved families”.

That is the point of this amendment. Failure to make full disclosure and to act with transparency can lead to lengthy delays in investigations and inquiries, and actually make things so much worse for the victims involved. A statutory duty of candour would significantly enhance the participation of bereaved people and survivors by ensuring that a public body’s position was clear from the outset, limiting, we hope, the possibility of evasiveness. I beg to move.

[The Lord Bishop of Lincoln]

My Lords, I support the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby. My right reverend friend the Bishop of Manchester is also a strong supporter of this amendment, which he has signed, and he regrets that he cannot be in his place today to speak to it himself.

As we have heard, six years ago, the former Bishop of Liverpool published his report on the Hillsborough disaster, The Patronising Disposition of Unaccountable Power. This report recommended the introduction of a duty of candour for the police, which was adopted in the College of Policing’s Code of Practice for Ethical Policing only earlier this year. I am glad that issuing a code of practice for ethical policing will become a statutory duty under the Criminal Justice Bill, but this is just one body. A duty of candour needs to apply to all public authorities. More often than not, crises, scandals and disasters which require an inquiry involve multiple, overlapping public agencies, all of which need to be under the same compulsory responsibility to act with transparency for that inquiry to be fully effective.

A duty of candour would challenge the instinct of institutions to focus primarily on reputation management in the wake of crises. This instinct leads only to more suffering and delay for affected persons. There is also a more pervasive effect whereby institutions are unwilling to be candid about their failures, so it is extremely difficult to learn from past mistakes. I do not believe that a duty would solve every problem, but it would certainly be a step in the right direction.

Brexit: Horizon 2020 and Erasmus

Lord Bishop of Lincoln Excerpts

Thursday 7th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

We believe that the current uncertainty makes it even more vital that we have a stable and robust regulatory framework to ensure that our world-class research base can maintain its position internationally. The Bill will put in place a framework to maintain our status; UKRI—the new body—will facilitate more multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research and enable us to keep up with emerging economies. It is critical at this time that we provide the stability that the university sector is looking for.

[The Lord Bishop of Ely]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a visitor to a number of colleges in Cambridge. In my conversations with the vice-chancellors of both Cambridge University and Anglia Ruskin University, which is in Cambridge, not only were they very concerned that there was a risk of losing £500 million of research funding for Cambridge and for the Russell group universities but—rather than the money—they were much more concerned about soft diplomacy and the free movement of scholars, which may be affected in the future. The vice-chancellor of Anglia Ruskin tells me that it is doing some very important research with a university in Portugal on earthquake studies—perhaps, by analogy, useful to us at the moment—and that this research could be in jeopardy. Can the Minister give us some assurance that there will be attention both to the soft power and soft diplomacy that needs to be assured and to how such research, with its real importance to vulnerable communities, will be sustained into the future?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

Of course the Government and I entirely understand the concerns of the sector. We have a world-class higher education sector and we want to support it and make sure that it is able to maintain its footing as the best in the world. That is why we will work extremely closely with the sector throughout the coming months and years to make sure that we provide the support, its voice is heard, and we do all we can to maintain it.

Outcome of the European Union Referendum

Lord Bishop of Lincoln Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Ely]

My Lords, I cannot match that passion, but I join other noble Lords in saying how much I appreciated the speech earlier of our boss—I mean of my friend, the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury. He and I have both worked in the north-east and been welcomed by the people of that area, many of whom voted to leave, just as people in fenland in my current diocese and people in east Kent, beloved of the most reverend Primate, did. These people were not, it seems to me, voting against the European Union but were making a great cry—a lament—about not having been heard for several generations by us, the political class. This was their opportunity to make us listen, after feeling excluded for so long.

About 20 years ago I read an essay by JK Galbraith called The Culture of Contentment, which seems prophetic now. It said how politics in the West has been organised for the wealthy at the expense of the poor, and that we would reap the whirlwind of this. In a peaceable way, that is what we are experiencing. There is a poem by the Christian poet George Herbert which includes the line “lament and love”. There now seems to be the opportunity to move ahead together in hope about the future that we might construct together. If I were to point a finger at the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, the presbyter on the other side of the House, there would be three fingers pointed back at me. Although recrimination is a natural human desire, it seems to me that we have to move beyond that and see how, together, we can as a Parliament support the Government in offering a new kind of leadership for the future.

There are various collective nouns which the clergy have for bishops, the polite one being a blessing. I strongly ask us to think about how we, as Parliament, might seek to be a blessing in the way in which we support government in an urgent redefinition of the leadership that we need across all political parties. It will not do for us to think about a steady-as-you-go way forward, but we need to have leadership which is radical in its imagination, generosity, transparency and rigour for the future of all of our country and all of our fellow citizens.

We are talking about the flourishing of all our people and not for some at the expense of others. As the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury referred to, one way of looking at this is through what we, as the Church of England, see as a vision for education into the future. The four pillars of this are wisdom, hope, community and dignity. So many of the people who have expressed their lament have been badly served over generations in developing their skills and aspiration for being real stakeholders in our economy and society.

If we are going to support wisdom, then we need to seek to invest in all that our people need in terms of training and being equipped with the right kind of education, which not only makes them economically productive, but grows in them—in us—the character to be mutually regarding as citizens, as those given to public life in the public service. We need to express hope that nobody is written off. One of our pledges in Church of England education is that no child is to be written off or excluded. That must apply too to the parents of children—no one is to be written off in our society and there is always hope for restoration and transformation across our communities. It is the purpose of all those engaged in political life to seek to make that happen.

All of us belong to community, one with another. I applaud everything that has been said by those who have been speaking against the way in which xenophobia and race hatred have been allowed to creep through the cracks lately and particularly in the last couple of weeks. We need to find new ways of living well together as one community and in fact, of course, it is in churches, temples and mosques where it is most likely that people meet cross-generationally to influence one another in places of safety. On dignity, some of the things people say—often to me—particularly in areas which have voted to leave, is that they do not count and there is no respect for them in the way in which any policy is framed. Dignity and respect are key.

All of this needs to be framed in outward-looking international environments, so that we do not become little Englanders but look outwards. We have a bold and vivid tradition as a country which has looked beyond its shores, not just for imperial adventure but to seek to transmit our values—all that we hold dear—for the advancement and encouragement of other peoples in other places. This is particularly true of our universities. In advance of this debate, I had a long conversation with the vice-chancellors of the University of Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin University, and both were keen to stress their first priority. There was concern for the migrant workers in Wisbech and the EU citizens who form a large proportion of their student body. They are anxious about the free movement of scholars. Scholars no longer live in ivory towers; there are now great highways of academic endeavour across the world, and Cambridge is the most important research university in Europe. How do we continue to make this vivid and real, not only for our own sake but for the sake of others?

The rest of my diocese is largely rural, but the fact remains that many of our farmers farm not just in this country but abroad; every year, half a million packets of lettuce come back into England from a farm that one of our big farmers has in Spain. He is profoundly concerned that proper respect is given to those people who, from abroad, make it possible for our food to be harvested. If it were not for overseas workers, there would be food rotting in our fields right now. So we need to be clear that our emphasis, even when we are concerned about our own country, is on all the implications for community worldwide, for the sustainability of community, and for the common good of which the most reverend Primate the Archbishop spoke, rooted in our application to wisdom, hope, community and dignity for all, so that all our citizens may flourish into the future.