Hillsborough: Collapse of Trials

Debate between Robert Buckland and Ian Byrne

Thursday 10th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Robert Buckland]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady, and she will forgive me if I do not go through all the important points I have made in response to other hon. Members. I will simply say this to her: she rightly raises the issue and she wants accountability—so do I, and so do the Government. That is why the work will continue in the months ahead, particularly the important work that the Home Office has conducted with the families directly, as a result of Bishop James Jones’s second report—the 2017 report.

[Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)]

Can I thank the Lord Chancellor for his answers so far?

On 15 April 1989, I witnessed 96 women, men and children unlawfully killed at a football match in Hillsborough, Sheffield. On 26 May 2021 in Salford, we shamefully witnessed a trial collapse on a technicality. After 32 years, not a single person has been held accountable for the deaths, and justice has been denied to families and survivors.

“Our loved ones went to a football match and were killed, then they and the survivors were branded hooligans,”

said Margaret Aspinall:

“We’ve been put through a 32-year legal nightmare looking for the truth and accountability.”

Mary Corrigan, whose 17-year-old son Keith—he was a great friend of mine—died, said she was “so angry”:

“It’s the lies, the lies that they’ve come out with,”

she said:

“It’s unbelievable.”

We now have families of the dead, survivors and indeed a city—broken by the events of 32 years—believing our justice system is corrupt and damaged beyond repair.

Does the Lord Chancellor accept that there need to be legislative changes to avoid families affected by future disasters facing the same mistreatment and injustice as the Hillsborough families and survivors have suffered? Will the Lord Chancellor commit to working with families, survivors and Members across this House to implement the Public Advocate (No. 2) Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle), which will help to ensure this injustice is never repeated?

[Robert Buckland]

I am profoundly grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his remarks and I listened very carefully to what he said. He was a witness to what happened and, no doubt, he has to live with that. All of us in this House would understand and share with him that huge sense of loss to which I referred and that sense of an ongoing injustice. I hope he appreciates that, in the answers I have given, I have set out the steps the Government wish to take on the important work that is being done on many fronts: potential legislative change; the work of Bishop James Jones’s inquiry; and, importantly, the work that quietly but effectively goes on between the Home Office and families directly. I say again that we have to act in accordance with our words, and doing things for, to or about the families is meaningless unless we do it with them—it has to be with them that we will make things better.