Oral Answers to Questions

Andy Burnham Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I gently remind Front Benchers that we must accommodate Back Benchers. I am not having the time eaten up by Front Benchers.

[Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)]

The Home Secretary is right: the terrible scenes of violence in Marseille this weekend have soured what should have been a great celebration of football. As ever, the vast majority have been let down by a hard-core minority, and their actions are all the more inexcusable given the serious terror threat hanging over the tournament. Although, as the Home Secretary has said, the England fans are not blameless, it is also the case that they were the subject of extreme provocation and that there were severe failings inside the stadium and concerns about policing. Given that this is a complex matter and that we need to establish all the facts ahead of the England-Wales game on Thursday, will the Home Secretary commit to making a fuller statement at her earliest opportunity, to ensure people’s safety and that there is no repeat?

[Mrs May]

The right hon. Gentleman is right: we obviously want to ensure that there are no repeats of the scenes we saw in Marseilles. That is precisely why work is ongoing between the UK Government and the French Government to look at the steps that need to be taken, particularly in Lens, where the England-Wales match will take place, and Lille, where Russia will play very close to that time, and that work will continue.

[Andy Burnham]

Let me turn to Hillsborough and mention that I wrote to all parties in the House, asking for their support in making it a moment of real change. One of the reasons that the Hillsborough injustice stood for so long was the inadequacy of the original inquest, which imposed the 3.15 pm cut-off and at which families had to scrabble around to raise funds for their own legal representation. The truth is that similar injustices are still happening today. Bereaved families are all too frequently thrown into courtrooms, raw with grief, to face adversarial questioning from highly paid QCs hired by the police and other public bodies. Later today I will put a proposal to this House to create parity of legal funding for families on the simple principle that public money should fund the truth, not the protection of vested interests. Will the Home Secretary say why she is opposing that move and whether she is prepared to work with us to establish that important principle?

[Mrs May]

The right hon. Gentleman has rightly raised an issue that has been a matter of significant concern to the families who were victims of the terrible tragedy in Hillsborough. He is right to say that the original inquest system did not serve those families well. I am pleased that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), the former Attorney General, was able to reopen the inquest, with the results and verdicts that we have seen. I have asked Bishop James Jones, who chaired the independent panel that looked into the Hillsborough incident and who has also been chairing the family forums and has been my adviser on this matter, to work with the families, to hear directly from them their experiences. I expect experiences about the inquest process to be part of that, which is why I wish to look at this issue once we have the full picture from the families as a result of the review by Bishop James Jones. The right hon. Gentleman has raised a very important and valid point, but I think that we need to look at the issue in a wider sense and get all the experience from the Hillsborough families before we look at the inquest process.