Hillsborough Law

Lord Wills Excerpts

Thursday 13th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wills (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for initiating this debate in such a magisterial way. I take this opportunity to thank and pay tribute to him for all his decades of work on behalf of the Hillsborough families.

The Bill is important because, as my right honourable friend the Prime Minister said at Second Reading in the other place, the experience of the Hillsborough families and so many others show how

“the culture of the state has to change”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/11/25; col. 655.]

The Bill is intended to do just that. As the Bill makes its way through Parliament, it is vital that the interests of the victims and bereaved in these great public disasters are kept front and centre of our deliberations. I suggest that they can be summarised as this: finding the truth about what happened and why, finding it quickly, and for accountability to follow without delay. All of this was denied for so very long to the Hillsborough families and so many victims of public disasters.

I ask my noble friend the Minister to clarify a few important details about the Bill that bear on those objectives. I will quite understand if she is not in a position to answer them today, but I would be grateful if she would agree to meet me at some point to discuss them before the Bill arrives in your Lordships’ House.

My first point is about the duty of candour. This crucial part of the Bill aims to transform the culture of cover-up that has characterised the aftermath of public disasters such as Hillsborough, but transforming the culture of public sector organisations is notoriously difficult. This is particularly the case when those in such organisations might feel they are in the frame for allowing the disaster to happen, rendering them liable to be charged, for example, with gross negligence manslaughter.

This was the charge eventually brought against Chief Superintendent Duckenfield over the Hillsborough disaster. The maximum penalty for gross negligence manslaughter is life imprisonment. The maximum penalty for breaching the statutory duty of candour in this Bill is two years’ imprisonment. In these circumstances, it is possible to imagine how someone who felt that they might end up with a sentence of life imprisonment might prefer to take their chances with breaching the duty of candour.

To lessen the chances of such calculations taking place, and to accelerate the cultural change that the duty of candour is designed to engineer, there need to be greater protections for whistleblowers. Imagine if there had been a whistleblower who felt sufficiently empowered and protected to challenge the poisonous culture in South Yorkshire Police following the Hillsborough disaster. There must have been some in that force who hated what was happening. If there had been such a whistleblower, the Hillsborough families would have been spared decades of struggle and grief.

The detriments suffered by whistleblowers and the public service they can deliver are well known, and I will not rehearse them here today. But this Government have repeatedly acknowledged that existing protections are inadequate, yet they have done nothing about it. The time has come to stop this prevarication, which is so damaging in so many ways. This Bill offers a rare legislative opportunity to do so, and I would be grateful if the Minister would consider all the proposals that I and many others in this House will propose for doing so in due course.

Secondly, I turn to the so-called parity of arms sections of the Bill, which aim to stop what the Prime Minister has described as bereaved individuals being confronted at inquests by

“armies of state-funded lawyers”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/11/25; col. 659.]

I hope the whole House will support that principle.

However, there are some important questions of detail that are unanswered in this Bill as drafted. Importantly, it seems to leave open the question of who exactly will qualify for legal aid at inquests. My understanding—which may not be perfect—is that the definition will derive from the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, which defines relevant members of an individual’s family as relatives

“whether of the full blood or half blood or by marriage or civil partnership … or cohabitants”,

or where one has parental responsibility for the other.

But what would happen in the case of, for example, a divorced couple whose adult child was killed in a public disaster? Do they each get legal aid? If not, how would the allocation be decided? There are many more such problems of definition.

Theoretically, this could lead to a situation, after a public disaster such as Hillsborough, where there are over 100 lawyers on legal aid acting on behalf of the bereaved. This could prolong an inquest for years, and, crucially, that, in turn, would prolong the trauma and grief of all those who had suffered in such a public disaster.

The Minister might point out that the coroner has powers to prevent such prolongation, but I ask her to consider the response from victims and the bereaved, not to mention the media and the general public, if a coroner were to try to shut down in any way an advocate speaking on behalf of any one of those victims and bereaved. So I would be very grateful for any light the Minister could shed on how the Government propose to tackle this issue.

Finally, I would be grateful if the Minister could explain exactly why the Government refuse to use this Bill as an opportunity to increase the powers of the Independent Public Advocate to support those bereaved by public disasters. She will be aware that the establishment of this position rose out of my Private Member’s Bill in 2014, the drafting of which, incidentally, was greatly helped by the Prime Minister in the hiatus between him leaving his post as the DPP and becoming an MP, and for which I and my friend in the other place Maria Eagle campaigned for 10 years. This arose out of my experience working with the Hillsborough families.

The Minister will also be aware that this position, as I had originally envisioned it, was significantly watered down by the previous Government. Crucially, the ability to set up the equivalent of a Hillsborough Independent Panel—the noble Lord, Lord Alton, referred to its importance—got to the truth quickly. That panel, which I devised when I was a Minister, was the way in which the Hillsborough families finally got the truth, after all the legal efforts and everything else. Incidentally, they got it in two years and it cost under £5 million, compared with, for example, the Grenfell inquiry: £170 million, seven years and still going. So why is there no provision in this Bill for such an independent panel—not to mention other measures to increase the powers of the Independent Public Advocate?

The right honourable Maria Eagle made a compelling case at Second Reading in the other place for not relying solely on lawyers—with all respect to my noble friend on the Front Bench—to secure justice for victims and the bereaved in public disasters. Measures to improve the powers of the Independent Public Advocate would not be alternative to measures in this Bill; they would actually strengthen support for the bereaved. I believe something such as that would command cross-party support in your Lordships’ House, and I await the Minister’s response to my suggestion with great interest.