Public Office (Accountability) Bill

Lord Wills Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 1st September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wills (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister made the case for this important Bill eloquently, and much of what I am about to say has already been said in some of the compelling speeches that your Lordships have heard today.

The Bill has two key objectives: creating a duty of candour throughout the public sector; and creating a parity of arms in legal representation between the bereaved and victims and the state. I am wholly in favour of these objectives, but I worry that the Bill as it stands will not deliver them.

Above all, I am not sure that the Bill will deliver what must always be the overriding objective when one of these terrible disasters happens; that is, to keep the interests of victims and the bereaved front and centre in the aftermath of any such disaster. I suggest that those interests can be summarised as follows: to find the truth about what happened and why, to find it quickly, and for accountability then to follow without delay. Without that, it is very hard for the victims and the bereaved to find any kind of closure after having suffered such terrible losses. For so very long, all of this was denied to the Hillsborough families and so many other victims of public disasters.

The duty of candour 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 organisations is notoriously difficult. That is particularly going to be the case when those in such organisations might feel that they are in the frame for allowing these disasters to happen. How confident can my noble friend the Minister be that this Bill will succeed in transforming that culture when previous attempts have failed? If any such confidence turns out to be misplaced, what action will the Government take to rectify any defects in the Bill that may become apparent?

My noble friend the Minister should also be aware that I have been contacted by some of the bereaved at Hillsborough with their concerns about the details of how the duty of candour will be implemented. They told me that they tried to raise these concerns with the Government but were ignored, so I would be grateful if the Minister could reassure me that the Government will engage more positively with any amendments that I table to try to address those concerns.

The problems with the parity of arms provision are less hypothetical. They start with its funding. A disaster like Hillsborough, Grenfell or recent disasters in the NHS could end up with scores of lawyers on legal aid. As far as I am aware, the Government only hope that this will not happen; they have given no guarantees that it will not. However many lawyers turn up, the cost will probably run into hundreds of millions of pounds and have to be found from departmental budgets that are already significantly strained and apparently face further cuts in the near future.

Then there is the issue of who exactly will receive representation. In an effort to restrain costs, the Government appear to have decided that only one person in a kinship group will receive legal aid for representation, and that will be the first one who applies. What would happen in the case, for example, of a divorced couple where the mother raised the daughter and the feckless father disappeared? The daughter goes with her mother to an event and there is one of these terrible disasters. The daughter is killed and the mother is in a coma in intensive care. The feckless father suddenly appears, seeking legal representation with an eye on compensation down the line. He would get the legal aid, not the blameless mother in a coma, as I understand the provisions as they now stand. I ask the Minister to consider what the response would be from that bereaved mother, not to mention from the media and the general public. How, they might well ask, would that square with the rhetoric of not one but two Prime Ministers?

There is the question of whether so many lawyers are only going to protract the proceedings of public inquiries even longer than they already take, a point already made cogently by my noble friend Lord Beamish. What reassurances can the Minister give that this will not be the case? There is also the question of whether the legal profession has the capacity to cope with the demands placed on it by the Bill. Many noble Lords will have received a briefing from the Law Society that sets out that point in detail.

However, I would not want the Minister to think that I am offering only criticism of this important Bill. I will conclude by offering two proposals that might at least mitigate its potentially adverse consequences. First, to mitigate the difficulties in effecting cultural change that the duty of candour wants to engineer, there need to be greater protections for whistleblowers, a point that has already been made. Imagine if just one whistleblower had felt sufficiently empowered and protected to blow the whistle on what was happening in South Yorkshire Police on the day after the Hillsborough disaster, and for years and years after that. There must have been at least one person in that force who hated what they saw being done. If one person had blown the whistle, those Hillsborough families might have been spared not years but decades of grief and trauma. I am sure loads of amendments will be tabled to try to produce better protections for whistleblowers. I very much hope the Government will now engage positively with them and try to make some progress on this.

Secondly, the Bill aims to tackle failures in process. That is admirable but it does not address, except indirectly, the question of giving greater agency to the victims and the bereaved. That was the purpose of my two Private Members’ Bills that tried to set up an independent public advocate, which was eventually established; we now have someone absolutely suited to the job in post. I would be grateful if the Minister could explain exactly why the Government refused to use the opportunity of this Bill to increase the powers of the Independent Public Advocate to give greater agency to those bereaved in these disasters.

The value of giving such agency is demonstrated by the Hillsborough Family Support Group, and we have already heard all the justified tributes that have been paid to its indomitable work over decades. I want to make this point again, because I do not think it can be made too often: the Bill owes relatively little to all the efforts of politicians and lawyers, and so very much to the way in which that group campaigned with such persistence over decades and with such dignity, having suffered such terrible losses. That is what drove me to set up the Hillsborough Independent Panel that finally got to the truth of what happened, and that is what eventually led to this Bill.

I hope the Government will recognise the advantages of giving the bereaved agency. If the Hillsborough Family Support Group could be replicated for significant numbers of the victims so that they could act collectively, that would deal with some of the problems of cost. We know that Trevor Hicks, the first chair of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, and Jenni Hicks, who spent 30 years working on the committee of that group, will help the Independent Public Advocate to work out ways of setting up similar collective endeavours in future. I very much hope the Government will now build on the legacy that those families have already laid by giving greater agency to those who lose loved ones in future, and recognise that funding legions of lawyers is not the only way forward.

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.