Hillsborough

Andy Burnham Excerpts

Monday 22nd October 2012 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)]

A year has passed since our last Hillsborough debate. That year has brought momentous events that many people thought they would not live to see. The truth has finally been established—more difficult to take, not less, for the passage of time, as the Home Secretary said. The tragedy was entirely foreseeable —it could and should have been prevented. Lives should have been saved. There was a campaign of vilification with no justification.

Those truths have been told only because of the sheer love of mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters—a love that would not let them give in, a love that provided strength when hope was lost and provided dignity in the face of provocation. Those truths were also told because of the people of a city that truly understands what solidarity and loyalty mean, who locked arms around these families—red and blue together—and supported them for every step on the hardest road imaginable. At last, the entire country can see what Liverpool has lived with for 23 years. Parliament, too, has finally woken up to the full horror of Hillsborough.

We have heard many powerful speeches this evening from both sides of the House. We have heard from my hon. Friends the Members for Halton (Derek Twigg), for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) and for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle), who have done so much to help the campaign, and from my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett). On the other side of the House, we have heard from the hon. Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price), who spoke from her personal experience, and from the hon. Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke). What is clear from those outstanding speeches is that, rather than the closure that people glibly talk of, the report has opened questions of the most profound kind for the institutions of our country, our Parliament and our society. As the debate comes to a close, I want to set out clearly what I believe those questions are. Before I do so, I want to speak for the Opposition in adding to the tributes that we have heard.

In the Church’s history, it is hard to think of a better example of one of its leading members fulfilling the functions of his office with more distinction or doing a greater service for the city and people under his direct pastoral care. The Right Rev. James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool, has brought light to people who for 23 years have been trapped in the blackest of tunnels, but he has done more. Through his leadership, he has shown the relevance of the Church to Britain today. Through him, the Church has succeeded where the state had failed, in bringing truth and the beginnings of reconciliation to a tragedy arising from a divided Britain.

We thank all the members of the panel for what they have done, and we thank the secretariat, under the leadership of Ken Sutton and Ann Ridley, for its outstanding support. Tonight, I pay particular tribute to Professor Phil Scraton. Of this I am sure: the full truth about Hillsborough would never have been known were it not for his meticulous efforts over many years, turning over stones that others had walked past. Professor Scraton has done a huge service not just to the Hillsborough families but to this country, and I hope the House will join me in acknowledging it tonight.

What is striking about the panel’s report is its thoroughness and the sheer comprehensiveness and quality of the painstaking researching that underpins it, carried out by the research team at Queen’s university, Belfast. I hope that the Government will consider that approach, with the emphasis on disclosure, not adversarial argument, a model for resolving other contested issues arising from our past.

There can be no doubt of the incredible emotional impact that the panel’s work has already had on the people most directly affected by the tragedy. As my hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire (Rosie Cooper) said, to be in Liverpool on the night of 12 September this year was to see a collective weight lifted from so many shoulders, which I will never forget.

I do not think we have begun fully to appreciate the scale of the suffering and loss, the true human cost of the tragedy, and the devastating psychological impact on survivors. From the midst of the most harrowing scenes imaginable—truly, hell on earth—thousands of them were simply left to drift home from Hillsborough, to try to make sense of what they had seen without counselling or support. Even worse, they were left to read in the days that followed that they were in some way to blame for what had happened. People talk to me of the lost souls that are scattered throughout the communities of Merseyside, the north-west and beyond, haunted by what they saw and never the same again. Tonight I think about them as we finally put right this terrible wrong. Does the Health Secretary agree that never again should people suffering trauma and shock on such a scale be left without the counselling and support that they need for their mental health? Will he give serious thought to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) about support for such services on the ground now?

In making this speech tonight, I think of my constituent Stephen Whittle, who on the morning of 15 April 1989 gave his ticket to a friend who never came home, and who just over a year ago took his own life, leaving everything he had to the Hillsborough families. Recent events will have been unbearably painful for Stephen’s family, but I hope they will take some comfort from the fact that the campaign that he cared about has finally prevailed.

Tonight, I also want to mention Carl Brown, 19 when he died at Hillsborough, not from Liverpool but a Leigh lad—a reminder that this tragedy affected everyone everywhere. It was a national tragedy, and we must all work to bring accountability and justice.

I pay tribute again this evening to the Prime Minister for the way he responded to the panel’s report, the tone that he set and the events that he has set in train ever since. I thank the Home Secretary for her speech today, her leadership and the personal commitment that she has shown to achieving justice for the 96. If I may, I want to leave two points with her this evening.

First, we welcome what the Home Secretary said about the co-ordination of the criminal process and investigation. It is important that we have clear leadership of the whole process, supported by a well resourced, professionally led, integrated investigation, not a series of parallel and unco-ordinated investigations. I hope she will continue to update the House on those important points.

Secondly, these are of course complicated matters that will take time to resolve, but the families have waited long enough. I urge the Government to ensure that public bodies and individuals conducting further work keep that thought in the front of their minds when carrying out their duties.

The impact of the panel’s report has already been immense, but the full enormity of what it reveals has not yet sunk in. It shakes our faith in the very foundations of our society, and in the organisations that exist to protect us and see that justice is done. If we are to learn from the report, those institutions must face up to fundamental questions, and in the time remaining to me this evening I wish to identify five areas of concern.

I will start with football, because of all the organisations in the frame, I believe that the football organisations have the furthest to go in facing up to their responsibilities—in fact, I do not think they have ever really started to do that in 23 years. The Hillsborough independent panel presents football with failings of the first order. A decade of warnings, starting with the 1981 FA cup semi-final, was not acted on. A ground known to be unsafe was made dangerous by modifications that were not recorded in the safety certificate. In short, as my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton said, it was a ground operating outside the law.

What possible explanation can the club offer for failing to ensure the safety of people who paid money to enter Hillsborough, and why did the FA choose a ground for one of the biggest games of the season that, as my hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire said, was not certified as safe? Neither Sheffield Wednesday nor the FA has ever answered those questions. What are we to make of the revelation in the panel’s report that the FA received complaints about the 1988 semi-final between the same two teams, one of which warned in stark terms that the ground was “a death trap”? Were those complaints acted on? Not only does it seem that nothing was done, but the guardian of the game in this country chose to bring the same fixture with the same teams back to the same ground the following year, prompting the question of whether the game’s governing body believed that it had any responsibility to listen to supporters, act on their complaints or ensure their safety and welfare. It is hard to conclude that it did.

For years, people were coming away from Hillsborough with tales of panic and distress. Is there any other part of our national life in which we would tolerate thousands of people going to a leisure venue and routinely coming away with injuries, broken bones, stories of frightening breathlessness, and authorities that do nothing about it? It reveals an unpleasant mentality that still pervades parts of the football industry, and a casual disregard for the paying customer. Costs were cut to the bone and safety was sacrificed on the altar of crowd control.

Like my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery), I remember my experiences at Hillsborough, and it angers me to remember that, when I stood with my younger brother and my dad on the Leppings Lane terrace in January 1988 for an FA cup third-round game, throughout the whole second half I was not watching the match but the backs of their heads. I did not let them out of my sight because I feared for their safety in the unbearable conditions of those central pens. There was a feeling that the football club had taken our money but could not be sure of our safety, having failed to take essential legal steps. It makes me angry to think of that and the thousands of people who were put at risk.

That is why I found it hard in September to see a response from football that was stunning in its inadequacy and left people wondering whether the football organisations will ever face up to their responsibilities. In their initial statements, neither the Football Association nor Sheffield Wednesday football club offered one single word of apology to the families. On Thursday 13 September, the FA had to issue a second statement when that was pointed out, and Sheffield Wednesday convened an emergency meeting on 11 September to rewrite a draft statement that contained no word of apology. That says it all, and as far as I can establish, the FA has not yet had a meeting to consider the panel’s report and its implications for the game’s governing body.

The hirer of Hillsborough and the ground’s owner both had a duty of care and a basic responsibility to ensure that a semi-final venue had an up-to-date safety certificate. Their failure to do that was, in my view, grossly negligent, as was the failure to act on warnings and complaints. That is why the families, rightly, cannot accept that the disaster was accidental, and why football must be forced to face up to its responsibilities in the inquiries to come.

Secondly, I will consider the media, but I will balance my remarks by mentioning some exceptions. In the run-up to the 20th anniversary of the disaster, an article by the outstanding investigative journalist David Conn prompted me to start thinking about setting up the disclosure process, and led me, together with my hon. Friend the Member for Garston and Halewood, to make the first public call for an inquiry.

The Mirror can take pride in its efforts supporting the families, the Liverpool Echo has given unwavering support, and ITV’s commissioning of Jimmy McGovern’s Hillsborough drama kept the story alive, but all that is overshadowed by the incalculable damage caused by the most hurtful lies imaginable printed as truth at an entire city’s moment of greatest grief. It was not just The Sun newspaper, appalling as it was, but many other newspapers. Why has the media industry never truly faced up to its moral failings on Hillsborough and the pain it caused people? Why did it not realise its own wrongdoing or propose proper redress to the families? Why, 20 years on, are bereaved families still facing outrageous intrusions into their grief?

Why did The Sun think it appropriate, some years on, to travel to Liverpool to make an offer to the families to pay for and build a sports centre and to give an apology only on the condition that the families accept the apology in full? The families did not owe The Sun anything. What does it say about the ethics of the media industry that an apology was presented to the families on those terms?

It is clear to me that Hillsborough was a forerunner of more recent events under the consideration of Lord Leveson—an early warning of out-of-control media that was not acted on. I urge Lord Leveson to call the Hillsborough families before he concludes his inquiry. I ask him to ask this fundamental question: how did the media leave this story alone when pursuing so many other trivial causes with much greater ferocity when the amended statements were in the public domain for so long? That was a professional failure to focus on what really matters and to give the proper redress that the families deserve.

Thirdly, on the coroner service, I have two simple questions. How could it ever have allowed a situation in which a parent finds out for the first time on 12 September 2012 what happened to their child on 15 April 1989? What assurance will it provide that never again will we see the denial of fundamental parental rights for 23 years?

Fourthly, on the police service, I recognise the force of the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough that the officers on the ground were also let down by their seniors. However, we will watch how the police service responds to the report, which will affect public confidence. I make this simple statement: the service must not allow retirement to be a route to avoid full public accountability, as the hon. Member for Elmet and Rothwell said. To allow it to do so would damage public confidence in the service, as would a situation in which the council tax payers of Merseyside pay for the pensions of people who are found to have acted improperly.

We learn in the panel’s report of a campaign orchestrated from the very top—it was ordered by the chief constable of the force—and of the shocking revelation that his officers were to have a “free hand” in preparing a “rock solid story” to exonerate the force and blame the fans. That is prima facie evidence of a failure of policing of a terrible kind—self-protection over public protection.

In responding to the panel’s report, we must not make the mistake of thinking that it was a one-off, exceptional, isolated event. David Conn was the first to draw the parallel with Orgreave, which a number of hon. Members have mentioned, and which has featured today on the main BBC news for the first time in many years. There are echoes of the Hillsborough story in the Orgreave story—statements amended; an institutional effort to shift blame. It is uncomfortable, but what has been revealed goes far deeper than many people would like to believe. The temptation will be to box Hillsborough off as isolated, but that cannot happen. The cultural problem must be addressed.

That brings me—fifthly and finally—to the questions for this Parliament and this House of Commons. We are good at asking questions of others, but this one is for us. How did we let an injustice on this scale stand for so long? Ultimately, the failings are ours. The panel’s report is an invitation to us to ask the most searching questions of ourselves. We failed to legislate for public accountability. We allowed a culture of cover-up. An entire English city was crying foul, rightly saying that there had been a great injustice, but their voices were not heard here in this House. No political party did enough to help them and, worse, we have a political class that looked down on Liverpool. I am left wondering whether this could ever have happened to another city. Every Member of this House should read chapter 12 of the panel’s report and ask how it ever happened that a propaganda campaign to impugn ordinary citizens of this country got a platform in the rooms of this Parliament and how, beyond a few stray voices at the meeting, the alarm bells were not ringing throughout this place.

We talk proudly of the mother of all parliaments, and of the reputation of British justice, but this adversarial tradition in politics and the law, in which two versions of the truth battle it out, allows on occasion the wrong version of “the truth” to win and it is often the version with the greater connections to power. For the Hillsborough independent panel report we can pick up the same threads as we find in the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday and as we have heard in the Leveson inquiry. All three reveal a country where the powerful and the connected hold the cards, where the concerns of ordinary people were dismissed—a country with an unaccountable establishment that at times colludes in its own self-interest and self-protection.

Hillsborough is a story of an abuse of power, of class and of unequal access to justice. I do not want to live in a country where that can ever happen again, where ordinary people can ever be treated in this way again. That is why I want this to be a watershed moment when this generation of politicians, this Parliament, truly learns the lessons of Hillsborough and builds a country where power is properly shared, where it does not take 23 years for ordinary people to overturn injustice and where news organisations cannot ride roughshod over people at their lowest ebb. Let us work together for greater powers to hold the police to account; let us bring proper redress for people damaged by an out of control press and implement Lord Leveson’s recommendations; and let us make more changes that connect Parliament with people, never forgetting that it was the public who forced Hillsborough back on to the Floor of this House a year ago. This must be a humbling moment for this proud Parliament, but in honour of the 96, let us make it a moment of change.