Hillsborough Law

Lord Evans of Weardale Excerpts

Thursday 13th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Evans of Weardale (CB)]

My Lords, like others, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for the opportunity to debate this important matter, and I shall be brief.

The long and painful process of inquiry into the Hillsborough tragedy demonstrated atrocious behaviour by a number of organisations and individuals who failed in their duty to act with integrity. It also revealed determined attempts to avoid accountability. Similar concerns arose in the context of the Post Office scandal and the Infected Blood Inquiry, to which I gave evidence. They also form part of the background to the Orgreave inquiry, which is about to begin under the able chairmanship of the right reverend prelate the Bishop of Sheffield.

I therefore welcome the fact that, after a number of false starts, the Government have introduced the Public Office (Accountability) Bill. Accountability is of course one of the seven principles of public life, initially articulated by Lord Nolan nearly 30 years ago and endorsed by all subsequent Prime Ministers. Without accountability, checks on the abuse of power are lost and we also lose the ability to learn from errors and mistakes. That is very clear in the inquiries that have taken place: we have failed to learn from the errors that have taken place over many years.

I am also therefore encouraged that the Bill goes a step further and requires all public authorities to promote and actively maintain high standards of ethical conduct. One might expect that most departments and agencies and other parts of the public sector would do this as part of normal business, but that is not the case. When I was chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, we undertook an inquiry into the ways in which departments, agencies and other public bodies encouraged and inducted their staff in terms of the ethical requirements of their roles. In many cases, the system was almost entirely absent. In fact, on one occasion I had a discussion with a senior official in one department who said that he did not believe that his department faced any ethical challenges or issues, which struck me as an extraordinary blind spot for somebody in such a senior role. I will not be naming names.

It is so important that all those in public service should understand what is expected, experience the opportunity to learn and then be expected to live up to those standards, and that there is a system to help and encourage and require them to do so. There is no such system today. I also wonder whether this duty should be widened to include Parliament, where our current induction into ethical expectations and conduct is often sketchy, to say the least, but that is perhaps a discussion for another day.

I further welcome the inclusion of the intelligence agencies within the scope of the Bill. Accountability may, of necessity, operate differently for the agencies, but it is no less important, and the Bill proposes a workable model to ensure accountability without prejudicing sensitive information, the publication of which would damage the ability of the agencies to protect us all from threats such as terrorism and from increasingly aggressive hostile states.

Of course, the test of the new arrangements will be the extent to which they prevent, or at least help to uncover, the abuses of the sort surrounding the Hillsborough disaster and the other scandals to which a number of noble Lords and Ladies have drawn attention. We need to keep an eye on the cultural aspects of this as well as the legal aspects and the education and the encouragement of all those in public service to live up to the high ethical standards which we all proclaim but which we have found are in a number of cases sadly lacking.