Hillsborough

Lord McNally Excerpts

Wednesday 12th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, makes a good point on this area of public confidence in the police, in particular. This is a policy area within the Home Office currently which we are taking very seriously. Noble Lords will know that the College of Policing has been set up. A code of ethics is part and parcel of its immediate mission statement. It is very much in the interests of a country that is dependent upon policing by consent that that consent can be given in confidence that the police are acting genuinely in the interests of the public, not of themselves. I could not agree more with what the noble Lord said.

[Lord McNally (LD)]

My Lords, the tributes to Bishop James Jones are well deserved but the statement by him rather ties in with what my noble friend has just said—that the bereaved families are “encouraged” but not “persuaded”. That is an indication of how far we have to go in winning not only their confidence but that of the general public in our public authorities and the capacity to investigate them when things go wrong. I seek just one clarification. My noble friend said that the inquest will start on 31 March. This ties in with the question about information from other bodies. How do you prevent cross-pollution from one investigation to another if the inquest is being held in public? Will remarks made there impact on the Stoddart inquiry or revelations from the IPCC? Will they be fed into the inquest? How are these three parallel inquiries to be co-ordinated or kept separate?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

You can rely on your noble friends, particularly your former colleague as the Minister of Justice, to tackle you on this subject. I am not a lawyer but I assume that the Queen’s court—the coroner’s court—has the power to seek all evidence. Its needs are the most important aspect of the inquiry while the coroner’s investigations continue. Clearly, information will be made available to the coroner’s court or discovered through the coroner’s inquiry that will inform investigations by other bodies. I would hope that that would be the case because the whole point of the inquest is to establish the truth about those 96 deaths, as well as to help clear the obfuscation that has long surrounded this issue.