Public Advocate Bill [HL]

Lord McNally Excerpts

Friday 29th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally (LD)]

My Lords, as I rise to speak I suspect that going through the mind of the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, is a conversation we had when he took over from me as Minister of State at the Ministry of Justice, when I said, “Don’t worry—I’m not going to be one of these ex-Ministers who haunts you when you’re doing the job”. I am in fact speaking twice today but that is still my resolution. It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Wills, and to speak before the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, on this matter. Both bring incredible experience as well as local and national expertise to the Bill before us. As we all know, the noble Lord, Lord Wills, is an ideas man and has a terrier-like determination once he has something in his sights.

I am very pleased to be able to support a Second Reading for the Bill. The debate is bound to be dominated to a great extent by the Hillsborough disaster. My parents were both born in Liverpool and I have a large number of cousins and second cousins and the rest dotted around Merseyside, so I know the trauma and hurt that Hillsborough caused. However, it is also important, as the noble Lord, Lord Wills, indicated, that this should not just be the final piece in the Hillsborough puzzle but should look forward to the disasters that will inevitably happen in the future.

Hillsborough, as the noble Lord, Lord Wills, indicated, was all too familiar, as regards how major disasters happen. Families and the bereaved feel excluded from the process; those with responsibilities become defensive and uncommunicative; and ranks are closed to protect reputations, avoid culpability, and protect commercial or operational confidentiality. The wheels grind slow and the lay person feels excluded, as professionals seem to take over what is for individuals not simply today’s headline but a deeply personal tragedy.

Hillsborough only now comes to closure over a quarter of a century after it happened. Lessons have to be learned by the football authorities. I remember where I was when I heard on the radio that there had been a disaster, and my first reaction was, “Not again”. Ibrox, Bradford—any of us who were regular football attenders knew that health and safety at football grounds was a joke. Now I think again, there have been massive improvements over the last 20 years in ground safety and the quality of the offer to the football fan. However, the lessons of Hillsborough still need to be learned. They need to be learned by the police, certainly as regards crowd control, which was unbelievably amateurish at Hillsborough, as we now know, and as regards their own internal behaviour, discipline and inquiries. They are hard lessons to learn, but learn they must.

The noble Lord, Lord Wills, paid tribute to the changes in the coronial system and the guidelines on speed and information now under way. It is worth while noting that the inquest into the 7/7 bombings, conducted by Lady Justice Hallett, received almost universal commendation for the skill with which she conducted it. The noble Lord, Lord Wills, is right to say that neither the Bill nor its supporters have any intention of getting away from the inquest system properly conducted. Government and politicians also sometimes failed to listen or act. Sometimes that is because of the reaction when these things happen, when our compensation culture kicks in and there is a defensiveness against that. However, that does not go against the key hurt which the Bill intends to address.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Wills, that there is no room for complacency. There is much more room for transparency; if any lesson runs through this like through a stick of Blackpool rock, it is about the need for transparency and openness in dealing with these issues. Therefore I join the noble Lord in urging the Government in dealing with the Freedom of Information Act to treat it as the precious asset it is. I end as the noble Lord did; the headline in yesterday’s Independent said:

“Hillsborough trauma ‘could be avoided’ under new plans to help families of disaster victims”.

That sums it up. On that ground alone, the Bill is justified in being given a Second Reading.