Hillsborough

Peter Bottomley Excerpts

Wednesday 12th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I can certainly give the hon. Lady that assurance. I think that the panel has done an excellent job, but, to be fair to it, it is not a coroner. Only the coroner can carry out a proper inquest. As I have said, there is very important evidence here for the Attorney-General to consider and to put in front of the High Court, but the panel cannot reach those judgments. Paragraph 60 says:

“It is not possible to establish whether a more effective emergency response would have saved the life of any one individual who died.”

But it then goes on to say, as I quoted in my statement, that

“a swifter, more appropriate, better focused and properly equipped response had the potential to save more lives.”

In the end, you need the precision of coroners’ reports to go into that sort of level of detail, but I think that the panel has done an extremely good job with what it had.

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

The Prime Minister has talked about getting it right.

Fourteen people were crushed to death around me at a funeral in El Salvador before this happened. As a Minister, I had to pay our respects to the 39 dead bodies at Heysel stadium.

Both at Hillsborough and at Heysel, people knew that the grounds were inadequate, and people had spoken about that in advance.

Could the Prime Minister say to people who want to be whistleblowers and alert people to dangers that they should be persistent and that their voices should be heard, and that when people afterwards find they have made a mistake, they should be prepared to say so early on?

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is entirely right in what he says. I think that this will be one of the things that come out of the report. It has been said before, and it has been known before, that there were problems with the ground, but the full extent of the fact that previous events had had similar problems and that there were quite detailed reports about the failings at the ground will be a very important part of the report. As he says, we do need people to whistleblow and to point these things out.