House of Lords
Introduction: Baroness Lowe of Armley
Introduction: Lord Macintosh of Eastwood
Humble Address
(1 day, 8 hours ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Lord Privy Seal
That an humble Address be presented to His Majesty, to return to His Majesty the thanks of this House for His Majesty’s most gracious Message, and to assure His Majesty that this House, always desirous of availing itself of every opportunity to manifest its dutiful attachment to His Majesty’s Royal Person and Family, will cheerfully concur in all such Measures, as shall be necessary and proper for giving effect to the object of His Majesty’s Message.
The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Smith of Basildon) (Lab)
My Lords, welcome back. It would probably be helpful if I briefly explained to the House the context for this Motion. On 15 July, the King sent a gracious Message to this House seeking consideration of the financial support of the Royal Household and to ask this House to adopt such measures as the House of Commons proposes suitable. The Motion I am moving replies to that King’s Message. It indicates that the House will concur with provisions that the Commons proposes and that when the Commons sends us the expected Bill, we will consider it through the usual procedures. I hope that explains the intention behind the humble Address.
Deaths of Members
The Lord Speaker (Lord Forsyth of Drumlean)
My Lords, I regret to inform the House of the deaths of the noble Lords, Lord Horam and Lord Snape, on 24 July and 13 August respectively. On behalf of the House, I extend our condolences to the noble Lords’ families and friends.
Retirement of a Member: Lord Jopling
The Lord Speaker (Lord Forsyth of Drumlean)
My Lords, I should notify the House of the retirement with effect from 24 July of the noble Lord, Lord Jopling, pursuant to Section 1 of the House of Lords Reform Act 2014. On behalf of the House, I should like to thank the noble Lord for his much-valued service to the House.
Arrangement of Business
(1 day, 8 hours ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate
Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms and Chief Whip (Lord Kennedy of Southwark) (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, before we start Oral Questions today, I would like to welcome all noble Lords and staff back. I hope that everyone has had a welcome break with family and friends.
As it is our first day back, I thought it would be a good opportunity to remind all noble Lords that the House wishes questions to be asked to be short, sharp, succinct and to the point. I think that in some cases we have failed to recognise that Question Time is the place to ask questions of, and scrutinise, the Government, and not the place to give speeches. As I have said before on numerous occasions, it is called Question Time, not “speech time”, for a reason. There is no greater favour that a noble Lord can do for a Minister than to make a speech before asking their question. Equally, the House expects Ministers, when replying to questions, to be short, sharp, succinct and to the point. If we do this, we will have greater scrutiny at Question Time of Ministers and the Government, and more Members will get the chance to ask a question of the Government.
I noted that my old friend the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, is asking the first Question, and that it is being answered by my noble friend Lady Sherlock. I have known both noble Lords for many years; in the case of the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, it is over 45 years. I am sure that both noble Lords will set the correct standard for asking and answering questions today.
Finally, when Questions are asked, we move around the House, enabling Members from different Benches to get in. It is unlikely that, after the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, has asked his Question, we will get back to the Conservative Benches before supplementary questions have been asked by the Benches around the House. I hope that that is clear and of assistance to the House. The Companion is very helpful to all noble Lords. There are useful paragraphs on Questions in chapter 6, pages 88, 89 and 90. The Companion is the agreed will of the House. It enables us to conduct our business with courtesy, respect and fairness, and at Question Time, to ask the questions that we want answered.
Working-age Welfare System
(1 day, 8 hours ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Balfe
To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to curtail the cost of the working-age welfare system.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Sherlock) (Lab)
So, no pressure then. My Lords, the Government are prioritising welfare reform, putting work and opportunity at the centre. Our system should support people to get into work and get on in work, while ensuring that those who cannot work get the support that they need. The Milburn and Timms reviews are looking across the social security system and will publish their final reports in the autumn. We will work across government to respond to their recommendations; in the meantime, we have a range of initiatives to support individuals to get into work.
Lord Balfe (Con)
I thank the Minister for her Answer. The situation that we are in today is not a Labour or a Conservative one; it is one that we have drifted into. Every day, we read in the newspapers about there not being enough money to go round. As a previous Prime Minister said, if you do not have money, you cannot spend it. Will the Government help by looking at ways in which the public sector welfare bill can be trimmed?
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, the Government are absolutely looking at how we can reform our social security system. It simply is not fit for purpose and it needs work. The noble Lord will know that we are in the middle of two vital reviews: into youth unemployment, led by Alan Milburn, and into the future of personal independence payment, led by my colleague Stephen Timms. In the meantime, we are taking action across the field, investing in support for young people, rebalancing universal credit to encourage people into work, guaranteeing disabled people the right to try, overhauling job centres and building personalised work programmes. We are determined to get this right.
Baroness Teather (LD)
My Lords, many people with disabilities and long-term conditions want to work and, with a lot more flexibility and support, would be able to do so. I welcome the new disabled persons bus pass with free travel, something for which my Lib Dem colleague Tom Gordon long campaigned. Does the Minister also support giving disabled people more rights to flexible working, including, for example, a right to work from home unless there is a strong business case against it?
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
I am very glad that the noble Baroness welcomes the extension of bus passes. The credit should probably go to my friend Andy Burnham rather than to anyone else, but I am delighted that she welcomes it none the less. We are working extensively with sick and disabled people to support them back into work, but we must first make sure that they have the support they need, the motivation they need and, crucially, the jobs they need. We also need to work with employers. We are doing a lot of work with employers who are trying to hire people and want to make sure that they know what they can best do. Our connect to work programme is working with both the individual and the employer, to find people, connect them with jobs and make sure that they get the help they need. That is the most important step to take now.
Baroness O’Grady of Upper Holloway (Lab)
Can my noble friend the Minister confirm that official figures show that spending on non-pensions social security will remain at the same percentage of GDP for this Parliament—at around 5%—and that we should deal with the root causes rather than the symptoms of dependence on social security by creating decent jobs, decent homes and decent healthcare?
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My noble friend is absolutely right about the level of GDP. It is around 4.9% of GDP and, as a share of GDP, spending on social security is due to remain broadly stable all the way up to 2030-31—I say in passing that, on that basis, overall welfare spending is in fact forecast to rise by less than half as much as it did under the previous Government. What is most important is that as a Government we are still committed to reforming the system. Certainly, we want to make spending sustainable, but we also want to improve outcomes. It is not good for people to spend most of their lives with no opportunity to work. We know that is the problem. We have to reform the system, and we are committed to doing that.
Baroness Bull (CB)
My Lords, according to Mencap, only around 5% of adults with a learning disability are in paid work, despite 86% of people with a learning disability surveyed wanting to undertake paid employment. Can the Minister say what the Government are doing to support employers better to understand how to provide employment for people with learning disabilities, who can be such a valuable resource in the workplace?
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
The noble Baroness makes an excellent point. She is absolutely right that the employment rate for people with a learning disability is unacceptably low. Through developing our connect to work programme, we have found that we need to work with both the employer and the individual who wants a job. I have been given some really interesting cases—some wonderful examples. A young woman called Jennifer, who had left college and been unable to get a job, worked with connect to work and was given help with interview support and with identifying an employer. They found an opportunity for her to work with Stagecoach. Stagecoach wants to employ such individuals and regards her as a valuable employee, but once she is in the job, connect to work can carry on supporting her and make sure that she gets the continued support she needs to stay in it. That is the way forward: to work with individuals and to find out what they most want to do. Jennifer is now a bus driver. Other people have opportunities to do other things. For each individual, it will be different, whether or not they have a learning disability.
Lord Hintze (Con)
My Lords, the Minister has said something very important. We have, obviously, a huge need to support the vulnerable in our country. We all agree with that. But what about what the Minister said about making sure that those who cannot work are supported? How are the Government making sure that those who are taking welfare—and there is a two-way obligation here, to the individual and to the state—are in fact vulnerable and need that support?
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
The noble Lord raises an important point. We all agree that those who can work should work and those who cannot work at all should be supported. That leaves us with two questions. One is: how do you tell the difference? The second is: is it an absolute difference anyway? I think it actually is not. The mistake we have made is assuming that the world is in two categories of people: those who can work and those who never can. The fact is that for lots of us there are times in our life when we can or cannot work, and times when we can do some work. Our job is to accept that the overwhelming majority of people can work, either now or in the near future, and we know they want to. Our job is to make sure that we support people and help them. But clearly the system is there. There are clear conditionality requirements. If you can work, you should. But just telling you that is not enough. We need to give you the confidence. For example, in our work with young people—I am sorry, Chief Whip, I will stop now.
The Lord Bishop of Manchester
My Lords, I am glad to hear that the Minister is so passionate about this and that, overall, this is taking place. As part of that, however, the Trussell Trust tells me that the majority of people who go to food banks are already on universal credit. Are the Government going to look at what it actually costs to survive in this country so that that can be factored into what levels of universal credit people are going to be getting?
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
The right reverend Prelate raises a really important point. As I know he knows, in our work on rebalancing universal credit, the Government are making the first above-inflation increase in the standard rate of universal credit. We are also investing in other things that support people with the cost of living: help with housing, with heating and with childcare. We need to support those who are out of work. Also, a lot of people on universal credit are in work, so it is important for us to help them to get on in work, develop, improve their salaries and have opportunities. Most people do not want to spend their entire life out of work. It is not good for them; it is not good for the state. That is our job.
Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (LD)
My Lords, can I talk about the young people whose parents are the richest—that is, the corporate parents, us, the state? In particular, can I press the Minister on supporting looked-after young people? What particular support can those young people who are leaving care look forward to from this new Government?
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
That is a really important question. The Government take a number of specific steps. For example, we know that some young care leavers find it hard to get into work, so we have people in jobcentres who are specialists in that area, who identify care leavers, work with them and give them extra support. There is help for them to get extra qualifications which they may not have. We have schemes about working with employers to employ care leavers. We have people who can help them develop at the next stage. Many of them get different levels of support in the benefits system depending on their circumstances. All that makes a difference, but in the end most of them are like other young people: they need an opportunity. We are now creating a range of things: a youth guarantee, support for those who need help, hiring centres for employers—and, if you are still there after 18 months, a guaranteed job for six months with this Government. That is the help people need.
Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)
My Lords, in September 2025, the leader of the Opposition, my right honourable friend Kemi Badenoch, offered the Government Conservative support for serious welfare reform in light of the warning that the cost of sickness benefit could rise to £100 billion by 2030. Will the Minister tell the House whether the new Prime Minister will take a different approach to that of his predecessor and work constructively with the Opposition to bring this rapidly rising and unaffordable welfare bill under control?
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, I well remember the offer by the leader of the Opposition—long may she stay so—to support any sensible offer on social security. I am always open to discussing with the noble Baroness and others how we can do that. We both think very similarly about the importance of supporting young people, in particular, to go out there and get jobs. I have already described that dealing with young people is a decade-long challenge. This did not happen just recently—between 2021 and 2024, almost a quarter of a million young people became NEET. It is a job for all of us as a country—employers, the state, everyone—to get out there and support young people to get the jobs that they need.
Saudi Arabia: Nuclear Power Programme
(1 day, 8 hours ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Lamont of Lerwick
To ask His Majesty’s Government what representations they have made to the government of the United States of America about their proposal to help the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia develop a nuclear power programme.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Wood of Anfield) (Lab)
My Lords, the UK Government regularly discuss civil nuclear matters with the United States Government, including through our representations to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. The proposed agreement is a matter for the Governments of the United States and Saudi Arabia. The United Kingdom supports the expansion of civil nuclear energy, both in the UK and internationally, alongside robust safeguards, safety, security and non-proliferation measures overseen by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con)
My Lords, may I be the first from this side of the House to congratulate the Minister on his appointment? Our Select Committee is left all the poorer by his elevation. Have the Government been able to see the full text of the agreement between Saudi Arabia and America, which is very profitable for American business but, if reports are to be believed, does not contain similar safeguards to those in other treaties applied in that area of the world? For example, press reports indicate that there are no safeguards for independent international inspection and no mention of uranium enrichment or the additional protocol of the non-proliferation treaty. Surely the safeguards applied in the past to countries such as the United Arab Emirates ought to apply equally to an agreement with Saudi Arabia.
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord for those kind comments. It is a real pleasure that the first Question I answer is from, if not my noble friend then my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Lamont. On his Question, as the deal has not been published, we cannot comment on the nature of the detail. However, it is reassuring that the United States and Saudi Arabia are parties to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Saudi Arabia has a comprehensive safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency, so there is reason to have confidence that the process in place will provide the safeguards that the noble Lord looks for.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
My Lords, I welcome the Minister to the Dispatch Box. Does he agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, that this agreement would be greatly strengthened if it made it quite clear that it would not cover enrichment or reprocessing of spent fuel, both of which would be a serious risk to non-proliferation and likely to lead to even greater proliferation in the Gulf?
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord for that and share with him a concern in general, of course, that all parties to the non-proliferation treaty exercise their obligations. The UK has long supported strong and effective safeguards arrangements, including the IAEA additional protocol, which the noble Lord mentions. We do not know what the nature of this deal is because, as I said before, it has not been published and we cannot really comment on it, but in addition to the fact that both parties are states parties to the NPT, and that Saudi Arabia has a comprehensive safeguards agreement, we know that there are bilateral safeguards agreed as part of this deal.
Lord Bruce of Bennachie (LD)
My Lords, given that Russia is building nuclear power stations in Turkey and Egypt, is not the concern about proliferation real? Is not the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, right to say that the problem with this agreement is lack of transparency, compared with the UAE agreement, which has no processing and no nuclear enrichment? Is that not the model which should be followed? Should not the UK be using its influence to try to persuade the Americans to publish the agreement and abide by those safeguards, and not encourage another nuclear arms race?
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
The noble Lord raises an important point about transparency. The UK works extremely closely with the United States across a wide range of issues, including civil nuclear co-operation. But to go back, this is an agreement that will be lodged with the IAEA. There are bilateral safeguards, as well as a general obligation that comes from the comprehensive safeguards agreement. Those are the due processes that should be in place when civil nuclear co-operation deals occur.
Lord Callanan (Con)
My Lords, I also extend my welcome to the noble Lord in his new role. I look forward to working with him and am sure that we will have lots of fruitful and mutually beneficial exchanges across this Dispatch Box. We have a long-standing and important relationship with Saudi Arabia. Our principal focus in the region at the moment should be re-establishing free and open navigation of the Strait of Hormuz. Can the Minister say what progress is being made towards that end?
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord for those welcoming remarks—stretching “fruitful” too much, perhaps, but I hope not. I look forward to engaging with and working with him. We continue to believe that a diplomatic settlement around the Strait of Hormuz is the only way of not only resolving the economic dislocation that has resulted from the conflict but preventing Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon. Iran must never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon and our position on its nuclear programme remains unchanged. My right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary and others in the Government are playing their part in trying to ensure that a ceasefire holds and that a diplomatic resolution is the ultimate result of what happens in the Strait of Hormuz.
Lord Spellar (Lab)
My Lords, I also welcome my noble friend to his position. We might be in a better position to exercise influence in the nuclear sphere, in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, if we had the capacity to be able to sell to them. Small modular reactors might give much better control, but we can do that only if the department of energy and others get a move on with the British model, particularly the Rolls-Royce, which has been pre-selected and preferred. If we get that going then we will have something to sell to them. That will also help us to enable a safer use of nuclear power for the future.
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord for that. In my first few days in my job, I had many discussions with my counterparts across countries talking about British leadership in SMRs—small modular reactors. I agree that it is an exciting area for the future. We support responsible expansion of civil nuclear power and work closely with the Saudis in nuclear co-operation and dialogue on this issue. There are opportunities for British companies, not just in Saudi but elsewhere, in particular in the areas that the noble Lord discussed.
Lord Singh of Wimbledon (CB)
My Lords, is it not a matter of concern that the United States is helping a country that was responsible for the 9/11 attacks—one that dismembered a dissenting journalist, carries out the death penalty on minors and discriminates against women—to develop this nuclear capacity, while threatening another equally odious regime, assassinating its leader and threatening to bomb its people into the Stone Age? Is this not a matter of concern?
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord for that question. We speak freely and honestly with the Saudis on human rights and a range of other issues, and we will continue to do so. However, the Saudis are, of course, commercial partners and important security allies. The key thing for reassurance on issues such as this is the international treaty framework within which such treaties will be conducted. The reassurance comes from the fact that both the US and Saudi Arabia are parties to the NPT; that the IAEA will be in receipt of the treaty, which includes bilateral safeguards; and that both countries have comprehensive safeguards agreements in place.
Baroness Rawlings (Con)
My Lords, have the Government had any conversations with the Sultanate of Oman?
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
We have regular discussions with all our Gulf partners. I will leave it at that.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, with the Chief Whip’s permission, and drawing attention to my interests on the register, I welcome the noble Lord to his position and look forward to working with him. In the context of the responses he has given, what assessment have His Majesty’s Government made of the Mecca agreement—a further agreement between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye that was signed recently—in relation to the overall issue of stabilisation and security in the region?
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord. I am afraid that I am unsighted on that, for which I apologise. I am still getting my feet under the desk. I will get back to the noble Lord with feedback on that.
Lord Kamall (Con)
My Lords, I also welcome the Minister to his position. He said, quite rightly, that the United States has not yet shared the text of the treaty. However, since that treaty has been signed, what conversations has his right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary had with counterparts in the US Government to understand, in general terms, what is inside the treaty?
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord for that question. The Foreign Secretary has met with Secretary of State Rubio twice in the first four weeks of his job: once at the ASEAN summit and once when he flew to Washington. They discussed a range of issues and will continue to do so. The treaty itself has to go through a rather complicated congressional procedure, which will be conducted in secret. As I said, we do not have the text and it is difficult to comment on the details, but I hope noble Lords who have shared concerns are reassured by the process that is already in place.
United Kingdom: Business Competitiveness
(1 day, 8 hours ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Meyer
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the cumulative impact of tax measures introduced since July 2024 on the competitiveness of the United Kingdom as a place to do business.
The Parliamentary Secretary, HM Treasury (Lord Pitt-Watson) (Lab)
My Lords, it is an honour to be answering this Question from the Dispatch Box. British business is competitive. It creates jobs, it produces the goods and services on which we depend, and it pays tax that funds public services. Those services in turn support business, and paying for them fully generates fiscal stability. Those services and that discipline in turn underpin business competitiveness. It seems to me that, through the system, we should be thanking businesses for the huge burden they bear and for the amount they generate for our economy and society.
Baroness Meyer (Con)
My Lords, I welcome the Minister to his new position. I thank him for his Answer, but I am a little surprised by his optimism. Since the changes to capital gains tax and higher employment costs, 6,000 business owners and company directors have left the country, some 13,000 stores and 700 pubs have closed, and 7,000 hotels, restaurants and cafés have entered insolvency. The warnings are coming from everywhere: the Institute of Directors, the CBI, the IEA, the British Retail Consortium, the hospitality sector and major retailers all point to the burden of higher taxes. We cannot tax our way to growth. Does the Minister not agree that to get growth, we need more entrepreneurs and risk-takers, not policies that drive them abroad?
Lord Pitt-Watson (Lab)
I absolutely do think that we should be backing business. I hope there is some assurance in the first speech that the Chancellor of the Exchequer made when he said that he was just as concerned about the cost of doing business as he was about the cost of living. This Government have done lots of things to generate competitiveness. One is fiscal credibility. Another is the trade deals. A third would be the industrial policy. Perhaps we are beginning to see in the things that businesspeople are saying that although there is some bad news—there is always some bad news—there is also good news. For example, earlier this year 46% of members of the British Chambers of Commerce expected to grow this year, relative to 35% last year. I could quote many business organisations and individuals who are essentially saying that Britain is on the up and a great place to invest.
Lord Bilimoria (CB)
My Lords, I speak as the chair of the International Chamber of Commerce UK. This country has been a magnet for inward investment over the years, yet over the last decade the number of foreign direct investment projects is at its lowest level for many years. I congratulate the Minister on his appointment, but will he acknowledge that a reason for this is the highest level of taxes that we have had in 80 years? That is eroding our competitiveness, our attractiveness as an investment destination and, most importantly, growth. Ireland next door reduced its corporation tax to half ours at 12.5%, has grown rapidly and is a magnet for inward investment.
Lord Pitt-Watson (Lab)
We would all like tax to be as low as possible and investment to be as great as possible. Britain is the number two destination for external investment, according to the PwC CEO survey; the United States is number one. Huge investment is taking place in this country—£360 billion in the areas that have been identified for our industrial policy. The chief executive of Lloyds Bank said it is a “phenomenal” place to invest. Although one needs to be careful about the enthusiasm of entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley, Jensen Huang of Nvidia said it is
“a great place to invest … You’re the envy of the world”.
Of course we want to have more investment, but equally we are seeing that growth is coming—in the last six months, the highest in the G7—and last year productivity was the best for 10 years if you take out the effect of the pandemic.
Baroness Kramer (LD)
My Lords, I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Pitt-Watson, to his post. He has already allowed me and my colleagues to badger him, and we will continue to do so. When the Government increased employers’ NICs and reduced the threshold, it gave protection to the tiniest small enterprises. But surveys now estimate that more than 40% of small and medium-sized enterprises have been significantly negatively impacted. Have the Government tracked the growth lost from the impact on this critical sector, particularly in the most disadvantaged regions of the country?
Lord Pitt-Watson (Lab)
The noble Baroness is correct that 900,000 small businesses are protected from this. There are also protections for hiring people under 21 and apprentices under 25. But there is not a specific study of this, and the reason is because we view this as a system. People pay their tax and therefore we are able to do education, transport and all those other services. Would we want that tax to be lower? Absolutely, but we will do it in a way that balances the books and maintains the fiscal discipline to which this Government are committed.
Lord Watts (Lab)
My Lords, is it not the case that these tax increases are required only because the last Government left us with a £22 billion deficit and hollowed out public services with their policies over many years? Is it not about time they apologise rather than criticise?
Lord Pitt-Watson (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord for that question. I have been trying to stay in the spirit of our new Prime Minister and to reach the greatest cross-party consensus that we can on this. What the Chancellor and the Prime Minister have said about being really careful about business costs, and making sure that business stays competitive, takes us some way in that direction. But every businessperson will tell you that you need to balance the books, and the comment from my Benches suggested that perhaps, three years ago, that was not taking place.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My Lords, I also very much welcome the Minister to his new role, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Livermore, for his contribution in one of the more difficult Front-Bench jobs, as the Minister is discovering. I will focus on growth, which was the top priority when Labour was elected with a huge majority. Yet many of the measures introduced—higher taxes and an assault on business—have probably reduced growth and competitiveness. So what is the new Andy Burnham Government’s growth target, and when do they expect to achieve it?
Lord Pitt-Watson (Lab)
One swallow does not make a summer, but the UK’s growth was number one among G7 countries in the first half of this year and the previous year had record productivity. Dismissing that and saying that growth is not taking place misses the evidence that we are beginning to see. What do we intend to do on this? We intend to follow the policies that have been working: the industrial policy, the planning reforms, the new sources of finance, being sensible about government accounting so that capital is not discouraged, fiscal credibility and good trade deals.
Lord Barber of Chittlehampton (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate my good and noble friend on his appointment to this job, which is a wonderful thing for the country as well as for him. On growth, does he agree that, while the amount of tax is obviously important, so too is the effectiveness with which the tax is spent? Will he bring this perspective to his dealings with Treasury officials?
Lord Pitt-Watson (Lab)
Of course that is absolutely right: the money coming through the Treasury needs to be spent as well as it possibly can be. The delivery of public services, particularly in support of activities that are so critical for business—our universities, for example—is a central part of doing our job properly.
Touring: Impact of EU Exit
(1 day, 8 hours ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Earl of Clancarty
To ask His Majesty’s Government what action they plan to take in response to the report commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, The economic benefits of touring and impact of EU exit.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Baroness Twycross) (Lab)
The report provides important new evidence on the economic and practical impacts of EU exit on UK artists touring in the EU for both the UK and the EU. We remain committed to our manifesto pledge and will use the report to strengthen the case that practical solutions will deliver benefits to both the UK and the EU alike. We are sharing the findings of European partners and the Cultural Exchange Coalition to allow them to be used in engagement with European counterparts.
The Earl of Clancarty (CB)
My Lords, I give all credit to the Government for commissioning what is a devastating report, if predictably so. Will the Government use the detail of this report to inform the next UK-EU summit, including especially the significant effect of Brexit on the creative economies of EU member states? Clearly, we need to stress the mutual benefits of sorting out what, frankly, should have been sorted out years ago.
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
The report does indeed provide evidence of an issue many noble Lords have raised with me, and the sector has raised with the Government: the impact of the post-Brexit restrictions on artists. The report provides new evidence of the impact on UK artists and on the EU itself—significant amounts of income are lost as a result. We will ensure that its findings inform our engagement with European partners as we continue to pursue practical improvements for touring artists. As the noble Earl will understand, the agenda for the UK-EU summit has not yet been finalised and it would not be appropriate to pre-empt discussions between the UK and the EU on its contents.
Lord Grocott (Lab)
Has my noble friend had time to reflect on the merits and demerits of EU membership, and the decision in particular of the people of Iceland over the weekend? Does she agree that a particular significance of that, which might be of relevance to this country, is that it was a decision made by the people of Iceland by over 80% of the electorate voting? There were also marked differences between the views of people in the capital and the views of people in the wider countryside.
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
The referendum in Iceland is a matter for the people of Iceland and Iceland’s Government; it is not necessarily appropriate or useful to comment on other countries’ decisions in this regard. As my noble friend will be aware, this Government do not intend to rejoin the single market or the customs union, and that policy stands.
Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interest as the co-chair of the APPG for dance. Bringing it back to matters cultural, this report highlights that dance companies lost £4.5 million in international revenue between 2022 and 2024. The report comes on the back of the ACE report on touring in the UK, which highlights that touring itself is in crisis. Will the Government commit to supporting the measures identified in this DCMS report that would mitigate and remove barriers, particularly for small and medium-scale companies, and help the dance sector across the UK to tour again?
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
It remains a government priority to support UK artists and to make it easier for them tour across Europe. The report makes it clear that there is a mutual economic and cultural benefit to the UK and the EU. The research also reflects what we have heard from industry, and we are now reflecting on the topics that emerged. We have shared this with sector partners, and I am absolutely confident that it will be a really useful tool in demonstrating, with evidence, what people have been telling us anecdotally. It is always useful to have this report, but I will take the noble Baroness’s comments back to the department as well.
Lord Strasburger (LD)
My Lords, this report confirms the damage being done by the many barriers to touring introduced by the botched Brexit deal. As predicted, it has cost the UK dearly in GVA and in jobs in music, theatre, fashion and dance. We are losing a generation of creative talent to Uber and Deliveroo. When will the Government start treating this problem with the urgency it needs?
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
I would like to think that the Government’s commissioning research on this issue, which we have now published, demonstrates to noble Lords across the House that we take it really seriously. One of the key findings from the report is that reducing the current touring barriers through policy or regulatory changes could generate a range of economic and cultural gains for both sides—it would be mutually advantageous. The loss of GVA to the EU is significantly greater than the loss to the UK, according to this report. I hope that this can form the basis of taking matters forward with the urgency the noble Lord describes, a view which we share.
Lord Ricketts (CB)
My Lords, a very precious object that is on tour arrived in the UK recently from an EU country. Will the Minister join me in celebrating the launch very shortly of the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition as an example of cultural diplomacy and the benefits of this—not least in inspiring a new generation of children to take an interest in history?
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
I would like to start by thanking the noble Lord for his considerable efforts in making sure that the Bayeux Tapestry is in the British Museum for the next few months. It is a really good example of how, by working closely with European partners—in this case, our colleagues in France—we have been able to facilitate an historic exhibition. We are hoping that as many people as possible will be able to see it, particularly children and young people. This is a really important moment for this country and our relationship with France.
Lord Brennan of Canton (Lab)
My Lords, as a member of the European Affairs Committee, I went on a cultural exchange coalition delegation, with the noble Baroness, Lady Bull. I also played in a band with the new Prime Minister. Has she had a chance to talk to the new Prime Minister about making this a higher priority? I welcome the report because, as the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, says, it is action that we need now, and that has been lacking so far. Can the Minister give the House the guarantee we are looking for: that this will be a priority and will be on the agenda at the next UK-EU summit?
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
As I said previously, it is not appropriate for me to pre-empt the agenda for the UK-EU summit. We do not yet have a finalised date, and I should not pre-empt discussions between the UK and EU on the content of the agenda. Regarding our new Prime Minister, I am not sure we have ever had a Prime Minister who is as enthusiastic and passionate about music and the music industry, including performing himself. I think we should take that as an indication of his commitment to the music sector and to touring artists.
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
My Lords, as the Minister says, other countries lose out when the UK’s brilliant musicians and other artists are unable to tour. Will she make that point, and the point made in this report, to the Government of the United States, who introduced higher artist visa charges in 2024, so that our artists are able to travel not just to the countries closest to us in Europe but all over the world?
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
It is really useful research, and I hope we use it in our dialogue with countries across the world. I will feed that point back to Minister Ian Murray. It is really important that we use what information we can to demonstrate the huge benefit to people; it is a mutual benefit and similar issues apply.
Baroness Bull (CB)
My Lords, I too very much welcome the commissioning of this report. At every meeting of the PPA so far, Members of this House have been making the point about mutual loss. Every time, EU Ministers have come back and claimed that there is no financial loss—but here we see there is. Does the Minister acknowledge that the artistic, audience and skills development that comes from cultural exchange over centuries has been important in shaping our cultural landscape and that, in losing touring, we are losing both important revenue and that cultural gain? That really matters.
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
It absolutely matters. From the Dispatch Box, I have regularly spoken about the importance of soft power. All these things matter. Cultural exchange is central to our future as a European country, and we are keen to do whatever we can to make sure that that is as strong as possible.
Nepal: Flooding
(1 day, 8 hours ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Lancaster of Kimbolton
To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to support Nepal following the recent flooding in that country.
Lord Lancaster of Kimbolton (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I declare my interest as Deputy Colonel Commandant, Brigade of Gurkhas.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Wood of Anfield) (Lab)
My Lords, I start by saying that I am sure that the thoughts of everyone in this House are with all those affected, including the families and loved ones of British nationals missing in this tragedy. The impacts of flooding in Nepal are devastating, as we all can see. The Question is about Nepal, but I remind noble Lords that China is also affected.
In response, the UK Government have provided £5 million in immediate humanitarian assistance. We are looking at how else we can help the response effort. In support of British nationals and their families, Foreign Office staff and our embassy teams are working round the clock. Rapid deployment teams have been sent to Nepal, which will bolster our ability to support British nationals and their families. We have also sent specialist humanitarian experts to support the response. We continue to be in very close contact with the Nepalese Government. The Foreign Secretary spoke to Nepali Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal on Thursday; he expressed Britain’s solidarity with Nepal and offered our deepest condolences. Our thoughts are with all those affected, and we will continue to support both the people and the Government of Nepal.
Lord Lancaster of Kimbolton (Non-Afl)
I thank the Minister for his reply and echo his comments: the thoughts of your Lordships’ House are with the friends and families of those affected and we thank all our staff at the embassy in Kathmandu, many of whom I know, who are doing a fantastic job. I have three quick questions. First, will the Minister pay particular attention to the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority? This fledgling unit in the Nepalese Government is co-ordinating all the international support. If it needs further assistance, I hope that we will give it.
Secondly, looking beyond the immediate crisis, Nepal’s biggest test is yet to come: how to build back differently and not replicate the vulnerabilities that this disaster has exposed. Drawing on UK strengths in science, risk modelling and climate finance, will the Minister commit long-term support to help Nepal become a global example of how countries understand, manage and finance climate risk while growing their economies?
Thirdly, I make a very personal plea, perhaps on behalf of the Brigade of Gurkhas. Its members would not forgive me if I did not express their desire, as they did after the earthquake in 2015, to deploy and support their fellow countrymen in the rebuilding of their country. I recognise that is down to a request from Nepal and to HMG.
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
I start by paying tribute to the noble Lord, not just for his lifetime of service in military and government occupations and political roles but for his passion and commitment to Nepal, and the Gurkhas in particular. On his first point, he is absolutely right that Britain has supported Nepal on disaster risk, and we should definitely continue to support the authority that he mentioned. The £5 million package that I mentioned builds on about £100 million of UK support, which has developed Nepal’s climate resilience over the past 10 to 20 years with strengthening resilience funds, a climate smart development fund and a resilience adaptation fund. There is strong partnership in those dimensions, and it will continue.
On his second point, I very much like the way the noble Lord expressed the ideal of helping Nepal build back differently. As he said, we have the science, business and political capacity to provide the kind of support that would enable that.
Thirdly, I pay tribute to the Gurkhas and I appreciate the noble Lord’s reference to them. As he said, the support we are offering has to be led by the Nepalese Government and partners on the ground. I assure noble Lords that the support we are continuing to provide is changing as the needs change in the development of this crisis and as the kinds of challenges that the Nepalese are facing evolve.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
My Lords, I welcome the Minister to his post and I wish him the very best in carrying out his role. I know that he has visited Nepal and that he will be acutely aware of the impact of this disaster. I associate these Benches with the words of the noble Lord, Lord Lancaster. We support the efforts of the Government and our embassy staff in offering support.
I will ask the Minister a broader question on the crisis reserve. In 2017, the OECD reported that the UK humanitarian crisis reserve stood at £500 million. In March this year, the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, told the Commons International Development Committee that it currently stands at a fifth of that, at £100 million, as a result of UK development assistance cuts. Will the Minister, in his new role, work with colleagues to try to restore the party consensus that existed before the development cuts to ensure that at least one area that can be restored would be the humanitarian crisis reserve? We know, regrettably, that that will be needed in the future.
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord for the welcome, and I very much look forward to working with him. I also take the opportunity, based on the noble Lord’s remarks on our Foreign Office staff, to thank them personally for the amount of work that they are doing. They are working round the clock to support British nationals and their families in incredibly confusing and difficult conditions. I pay tribute to them and thank them for that.
On the crisis reserve, I would love to establish a cross-party consensus. It is a matter of public record that the Government have made tough decisions on ODA. I am pleased to say that the response of the UK Government in the past week on Nepal has been full and comprehensive. It is in partnership and observes all the principles that a good crisis response should. Yes, there are financial challenges, and I am sure that we will return to those. Of course, there are issues that arise from the budget decisions that have been made, but I am pleased to say that the UK Government’s crisis response has so far been exemplary and of huge help to the Nepalese Government.
Lord Swire (Con)
My Lords, we all welcome what the Government are doing in terms of responding to the tragedy that has unfolded over the last few weeks in Nepal. Could the Minister take back to his colleagues in the FCDO the question of Bhutan? It shares many of the same characteristics as Nepal, but we have no permanent diplomatic representation in Bhutan, and it sometimes gets overlooked. When they are undertaking these studies, particularly around preventing these things and the early warning equipment that Bhutan has very little of, could he please discuss these matters with his colleagues?
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord for that. It is an extremely important point. Sadly, this will not be the last incident of this sort, and there are lots of countries that share geographical, climate and economic features that we can learn from. Cross-referencing the successes and shortcomings of how the world has responded to this is an important issue across countries, including Bhutan.
Lord Beamish (Lab)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Lancaster, mentioned the Gurkhas. Our thoughts are with all those who serve in British forces and with their families in Nepal. Could the Minister say what support is being given to the Gurkha Welfare Trust and other organisations that support Gurkha veterans in Nepal?
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
I apologise to the noble Lord; I do not have details on that. I will definitely come back to him with more details on the kind of support that we are offering.
Lord Bilimoria (CB)
My Lords, I was brought up with the Gurkhas from birth, and my late father, General Bilimoria, was president of the Gurkha Brigade in India. To follow on from the previous question and what the major-general, the noble Lord, Lord Lancaster, said, what specific help are the Government giving to the Gurkhas in this country whose families have been affected by this awful tragedy, including the Gurkha Welfare Trust? Are the UK Government working with the Indian Government, because there are many pilgrims, including pilgrims from here, who have gone from India to Mount Kailash and have been tragically affected by this? Are we co-ordinating with India?
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
Let me say a little bit more about the kind of support that we are offering. We have deployed consular staff to the region, who are providing 24/7 assistance and advice to family and friends worried about loved ones in Nepal, China and the UK. UK policing is also supporting the response through the deployment of family liaison officers to the families of those affected. They are providing dedicated support to affected families in the UK.
Lord Camoys (Con)
My Lords, I too congratulate the Minister on his new appointment. I declare my interest as chair of the UK charity Nepal Nature Trust, and as a member of the governing board of Nepal’s National Trust for Nature Conservation. The UK Met Office previously helped Nepal develop flood early-warning systems. Will the Government now build on that work and help develop the Himalayan equivalent of a tsunami warning system that would work across borders and would be capable of detecting sudden glacial collapses such as that seen last week, which current systems were not able to deal with, giving downstream communities precious minutes to reach safety?
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord for that question. He points to an important element that I referred to in answer to an earlier question about lessons that need to be learned not just by consular, political and other bodies but by scientists. The Met Office will, I am sure, play a huge part in this because of the international collaborations that it already has and will continue to have.
Lord Hussain (LD)
My Lords, according to many international organisations, including the national development programme, India and Pakistan are among the nations at the highest risk of cloudbursts and glacier bursts. What are our Government doing to help those countries to put in early warning signs and other measures to deal with these catastrophes when they happen?
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord for that. Part of bilateral assistance includes climate support across the piece regularly, including to India and Pakistan. I think it is fair to say that as a result of this catastrophe, which is what it is, there will have to be a focus on updating the kind of support that will need to be provided, not just by the UK Government but by partners across the world, for countries that may face similar challenges, and I am sure that that is work that we will be leading and are looking forward to.
Lord Popat (Con)
My Lords, we have a very special relationship with Nepal, especially the Gurkha soldiers serving the British Army for the last six decades. What happened was tragic and I welcome the financial support that the Government are giving, but I think we need to give more. They need food and medical supplies, they need emergency shelter and, particularly while a lot of bodies are still under mud, rescue, logistics, temporary reconstruction of housing and, of course, infrastructure restoration. I am sure that we can do more than we have done so far. Can the Minister please take it to his office and discuss and debate this to see what more we can do to help Nepal in this difficult time?
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord. I think this is a good opportunity for me to say a little bit about the kind of support we are providing. We are providing up to £750,000 through the Red Cross movement for emergency humanitarian assistance—for clean water, shelter, first aid and supplies—up to £1 million through Start Fund Nepal for local organisations that are delivering life-saving assistance, and up to £250,000 to deploy UK humanitarian experts and strengthen co-ordination efforts.
On top of that, of course, there are the contributions of the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, to which we are contributors, so there is a lot of support. I want to reassure the noble Lord, who is completely right to say that a bewildering variety of needs will have to be served, that we are in close contact with the Nepalese Government and authorities about the kind of support that we can offer: where it is complementary to what they are providing, where it is being provided anyway, and where there are gaps that in future will need to be filled. Those are exactly the conversations that are ongoing, with a view to exactly the priorities he discussed.
Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston (CB)
My Lords, will the Minister join me in paying tribute to Rajendra Dawadi, the head teacher who saved 900 schoolchildren from the floods, and hundreds more by alerting the bus drivers so they did not deliver them to the school? It is an example of individual heroism that I think we should acknowledge.
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
I thank the noble Baroness for that example; I do join her in that. Like other noble Lords, I have been struck by the extraordinary human stories over the past week. I think it is worth saying again that we can only imagine the horror and terror of family members who have no idea where their family members are at this moment. It is a tragedy that is full of extraordinary heroism, but also deep horror and confusion, and I am glad that the UK Government are playing their part in supporting as much as possible.
The Earl of Courtown (Con)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his contributions and his update on this devastating event that happened in Nepal. I also join other noble Lords in sending our condolences to the families of the victims and our support for those responding, whether as part of our diplomatic service or from other countries, and the Nepalese people. However, we have heard a lot about what has been happening in Nepal, but I wonder whether the Minister can contribute a little more about what is actually happening in Tibet and under the Chinese authorities. Are there any British nationals who are facing difficulties there, and have we any idea of the number of British nationals in that part of the world?
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord for that statement, which I agree with, and for raising the issue of China. This has been discussed as a Nepalese issue but, as we know, partly because of the pilgrimage that a lot of people were on, this is a passage that goes across the Nepalese and Chinese border. To give an update on numbers, we have 36 British people currently unaccounted for. We are working with the Chinese authorities as well as the Nepalese authorities. It would be unfair to say anything more about the individual cases of British nationals, but those are the cases that the British consular authorities and British support are catering to at the moment.
Financial Services and Markets Bill
(1 day, 8 hours ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Pitt-Watson
That the amendments for the Report stage be marshalled and considered in the following order:
Clause 1, Schedule 1, Clauses 2 to 13, Schedule 2, Clauses 14 to 31, Schedule 3, Clauses 32 to 53, Title.
Social Housing Bill [HL]
(1 day, 8 hours ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)
My Lords, first, I give my sincere thanks to noble Lords across the House for the care, expertise and constructive challenge they have brought to this important piece of legislation. As someone for whom social housing—council housing—provided a secure, safe and affordable foundation as I was growing up, this is an issue very close to my heart, and I have heard that from many Members across the Chamber as well.
I thank the Opposition Front Benches for their thoughtful and robust challenge of the Bill and their constructive engagement. I thank in particular the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, who started the Bill off with me, as she has done with so many Bills over the past couple of years; the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, for the very constructive and courteous work that we have done together as we have gone through the Bill; and, of course, the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson. I also thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Thornhill and Lady Pinnock, for their very significant contributions to the Bill and for their support for much of what we have been trying to do.
I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for his long-held passion for and dedication to achieving long-term solutions to homelessness; and the noble Baroness, Lady Neate, and my noble friend Lady Hyde for their advocacy for victims of violence against women and girls throughout the Bill’s passage. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, in particular, for his thoughtful and constructive contributions on shared ownership. I know many will welcome the attention he has brought to the challenges that some shared owners face.
I am also grateful to those across the House who have been particularly engaged with matters relating to the Bill. Their contributions have illuminated the issues that the Bill aims to tackle and helped us improve the legislation itself. This is reflected in the planned Commons amendments relating to strengthening protections for victims of domestic abuse, right-to-buy rural criteria, and the disposals notification period. We are also undertaking rapid work on exploring policy options for access for safety checks and for security of tenure for those fleeing violence.
Baroness Thornhill (LD)
We on these Benches positively welcomed the Bill. Anything that preserves social housing is particularly welcome, so the right-to-buy proposals were indeed very valuable, as was the work to protect vulnerable tenants—those who were victims of domestic violence—and the tidying up and repealing of old legislation that, frankly, was never used because it was completely unworkable. With all that said, I think that, across the House, we were all disappointed with the very narrow scope of the Bill, and that was reflected in the number of amendments and the quality of the debate. I think we had wanted more but understood the Minister to say, “Yes, it is a narrowly focused Bill, but this is what it is doing”.
Therefore, we on these Benches seek reassurance on the two strands the Minister mentioned: the excellent work done by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, on shared ownership, and by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, on the plight of rural housing. Those came through so strongly that we feel we have to have some follow-up, and we will pursue and support that.
I thank the Minister for her willingness to engage with us; she was, and is always, very generous with her time. I also praise the constructive spirit of the newish Opposition Front Bench. It has to be said that, although we strongly disagreed with their stance on the eligibility of social housing and opposed their efforts to restrict it, we agreed on lots of other issues around transparency and accountability and on better than one-for-one replacement, and we shared their concerns about some RSLs, although not all—I say to the noble Lord, Lord Best—around their effectiveness, particularly with regard to anti-social behaviour. These are all issues that I am sure we can visit in other ways. With that said, we are very pleased to see the Bill progress and thank everyone who had anything to do with it—I will not repeat a long list—and all noble Lords who took part in the debates.
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
My Lords, if I may intervene very briefly to follow up on what the noble Baroness has just said about shared ownership, the Minister will recall that the Government suffered a very significant defeat—by some 86 votes. It was the first defeat of the Burnham Administration, on the Monday before we rose, and was on the issue of shared ownership. The Minister was good enough to concede that we need improvements, but she was not able to go quite as far as the amendment in my name, supported by others, went. Will she agree to discussions before the Commons addresses the Bill to see whether we can find a way through on shared ownership, to try to bring this to a conclusion? If we are to do that, she will need to go a little bit further than she was able to in July. Is there some flexibility in the Government’s position?
Lord Best (CB)
My Lords, I will add a Cross-Bench voice to the thanks due to the Minister and the Bill team, not just for listening in numerous meetings to the case made for a series of amendments that we proposed but for the actions being taken as a result. As I can testify from many years of trying to improve the housing Bills that come before us, change seldom follows directly from the adoption of an unaltered amendment accepted by, or imposed on, the Government. But change can be achieved none the less, and in this Bill, thanks to commitments made by the Minister, progress has been forthcoming on a range of important issues.
The value of these improvements, which will be embodied in better guidance from government, statutory instruments that contain the small print and, yes, some government amendments, should not be underestimated. They include better-defined exemptions for right-to-buy sales in rural areas, pressed for by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, and me; additional protections for tenants in domestic abuse cases, championed by the noble Baroness, Lady Neate, and her supporters; better practice for those losing their social housing because police advice has been to leave accommodation targeted by violent gangs; a longer timescale for housing associations to notify local authorities before selling off precious social housing, achieved after several fruitful meetings involving the Chartered Institute of Housing, the Local Government Association and others; and clarification of the law to enable social landlords to gain access to properties to carry out safety checks, but only after meeting strict conditions for assessing vulnerability for tenants, giving adequate notice before entry and so on, as advocated by the tenant representatives of the G15 residents’ group.
The Bill has led to a whole range of significant changes, mostly non-legislative but effective none the less, thanks to the Minister listening and acting—not least in response to the Cross-Benchers’ representations. This is much appreciated.
Lord Jamieson (Con)
My Lords, I trust that everyone has had the opportunity to recharge their batteries over the summer, as I see that we have a rather busy schedule over the coming few months. The Recess provided an opportunity to reflect on the Bill. As mentioned by my friends in the Liberal Democrats, despite being named the Social Housing Bill, its real focus has been to restrict tenants’ rights to buy their own homes. We oppose that approach.
Right to buy has been one of the greatest drivers of social mobility this country has ever seen, enabling millions of families to build capital and stand on their own two feet. We are the party of opportunity, while it seems the party opposite and others favour increased state dependency. We on these Benches believe that combining right to buy with a one-for-one replacement policy with 100% retention of sale proceeds, as introduced by the last Conservative Government, would see increased availability of social homes and deliver the new homes that we all want to see.
With 1.34 million people on council housing waiting lists, we have also sought to address how the current stock of 5.3 million social homes is managed—cracking down on fraud, reducing underoccupation, encouraging those who can afford it to move on and, as the noble Baroness mentioned, looking at greater transparency. This move could free up hundreds of thousands of social homes for those British citizens truly in need.
We pursued amendments to address the problems within shared ownership. I thank my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham for his work in this area. We appreciate the Minister’s commitment to look at this, but I am at one with my noble friend in saying that more needs to be done. This is a key area.
We strongly welcome the Government’s commitment to tackling the issues that domestic abuse victims face in the social housing system. This House discussed its practical implementation.
Finally, I place on record my sincere thanks to the Minister for the time she has taken to engage outside the Chamber and for the considerable work she has done in steering the Bill through the House. Her professionalism has been greatly appreciated across your Lordships’ House. I thank my noble friends for their support over the many hours in this Chamber and all noble Lords who have engaged generously throughout. In particular, I thank my noble friends Lady Scott of Bybrook and Lady O’Neill of Bexley. I also thank those not in the Chamber—Amrita, Richard, Hannah and Henry—who all provided considerable help. I thank all the staff and doorkeepers. Fortunately, this Bill was not quite as long and strenuous as some of the other Bills we have debated.
The Bill may not deliver the housing that our country needs, but our debates have shown that your Lordships’ House remains committed to addressing this issue.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
My Lords, I echo the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, in welcoming everyone back to the House. I omitted to do that when I stood up earlier. It is great to be back here. If the noble Lord thinks this Bill has been a bit less painful, I remind him that we have the elections Bill next; I look forward to those debates.
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, for her comments. She is quite right that this is a very narrowly scoped Bill. The title might perhaps suggest otherwise, but the reason it has been so narrowly focused is that there is a complete review of the allocations process going on simultaneously, and those things can be changed without going through a primary legislation route.
The noble Baroness was right to refer to both shared ownership and rural issues; both are things that we are still debating. The noble Lord, Lord Young, also raised the issue of shared ownership. The department looks forward to further discussions with him as the Bill makes its progress through the Commons. I will be happy to meet him at any time to try to move this on.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Best, for all the work he did during the passage of the Bill, particularly around access for safety issues. It is key that our housing providers are able to access. We put a lot of stress on them in insisting that their properties are safe, and they need support to do that. There is more work to be done before we can move that forward.
The noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, and I have fundamental differences about the purpose of this Bill. Our Government are not withdrawing right to buy—we do not think that is the right thing to do—but the fatal flaw in the right-to-buy process was not replacing those properties. There are towns such as mine where we went down from over 30,000 council homes to 8,000; that has been a big generator of some of the housing issues that we have seen over the years. This Bill aims to make sure that we get the balance right in giving people the opportunity to buy their own home without impacting unnecessarily on that housing supply. The issues around fraud and underoccupation that the noble Lord mentioned can be dealt with outside legislation; I know that councils are looking at that all the time as well. I am grateful for all the contributions that have been made.
Public Office (Accountability) Bill
(1 day, 8 hours ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Lemos) (Lab)
My Lords, I hope all noble Lords had a good break over the summer. As your Lordships might perhaps have noticed, we have been beavering away at the Ministry of Justice. If you get a call from No. 10, as I did on the last day before Recess, be careful what you wish for. I thank the many noble Lords who interrupted their summers to meet me; I appreciate their time and commitment enormously.
It is a privilege to open the debate on this Bill. It is a long-overdue piece of legislation, one that will deliver one of the biggest constitutional changes in the relationship between the public and the state for generations. We should not underestimate its importance or the impact it could have.
I start, as I should, by paying tribute to those who have fought to get us here. The Hillsborough families experienced the most awful injustice. The state turned on them exactly when it should have been on their side. They never gave up on the truth and, ultimately, getting the justice they deserved. They insisted that no one should ever have to go through what they went through. It is their courage and determination that have brought us to your Lordships’ House today with this legislation in front of us.
I also pay tribute to Members of your Lordships’ House for their determined and courageous work over many years—indeed, decades. Many Peers here today have stood by the families and supported them. Please forgive me: I do not have time to mention everyone as time is short.
I am also mindful that it is not just the Hillsborough families whose work has brought us to this point. There has been a coalition of families and campaign groups who have fought for the truth, and I thank all of them on behalf of the Government for the Bill being debated today. I am pleased to note that some of them are in the Public Gallery today and many others will be watching our proceedings, and I am sure that all speakers in this debate will keep that in mind. I warmly welcome them to your Lordships’ House today.
We have seen time and again why the Bill is so vital. The Post Office Horizon scandal, infected blood, Grenfell and, most recently, the shocking Nottingham maternity scandal all involved a lack of candour and efforts to conceal the truth. In some cases, attempts were even made to create false narratives against the victims. As well as these well-known examples, we must also bear in mind the many individual cases where the state has not just failed in its duty but actively worked against the people it has wronged. That is disgraceful.
The public should be able to expect that our public institutions will do everything reasonably possible to prevent serious failures happening. They should also be able to expect that, when something does go wrong, those institutions will tell the truth and—this is a key point to which we will return in the debate—tell the truth quickly. That requires more than candour when someone is called to an inquiry, inquest or investigation. Public servants must know that, when something has gone wrong, there is an obligation to come forward and say so. They should be able to do so without fear of professional consequences, and it should be clear what is required of them. If they believe there is wrongdoing or behaviour that falls below what is expected, there should be routes for them to report that. The aim of the Bill—I stress this point—is to change the culture of public bodies once and for all. No family should have to fight for the truth about what happened to their loved ones, no family should face a profound disparity in legal representation and no public official should be in fear that they will be asked to lie, conceal the truth or stay silent. That is our intention for the Bill.
I will set out the measures in the Bill, starting with the two duties of candour that it creates. The first is a statutory duty of candour and assistance, requiring all public servants and officials to come forward proactively, as I have said, and act with candour, transparency and frankness in all inquiries and investigations seeking to establish the truth. Failure to comply, with the intention of impeding the investigation, or being reckless in doing so, will be a criminal offence punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment.
The duty will apply to statutory and non-statutory inquiries, coroners’ investigations and inquiries called by local authorities, with a power for Ministers to extend it to other types of investigation through secondary legislation. While principally focused on the public sector, it will also apply to private sector bodies such as those delivering public functions, those with health and safety responsibilities and relevant public sector contractors. These measures will apply across the United Kingdom and I thank the devolved Governments for their close work with officials in the Ministry of Justice and the Cabinet Office.
I know there has been particular interest in how the duty will apply to the intelligence services. The Government have always been clear that the intelligence services are within scope, but we have listened to concerns about the application of the duty to individuals and the handling of sensitive information. Amendments made in the other place ensure that the duty applies fully to all current and former intelligence services personnel, while using established procedures to protect national security information.
What this means in practice is that, where an individual employee of a national security body receives a request under the duty for protected information, they must pass that information to the head of the relevant authority, rather than directly to the inquiry or investigation. The head of the authority is then responsible for providing that information, subject to existing legal and practical safeguards on disclosure. Where necessary, restrictions on disclosure can be sought through existing legal routes including, in exceptional cases, converting proceedings into a secure statutory inquiry.
The amendments also make it clear that responsibility for notifying an inquiry, inquest or investigation about sensitive material rests with the national security body to which that information belongs. Where another public authority holds a copy, it must inform the relevant national security body, allowing that body to assess the material in its wider context and ensure that the appropriate safeguards are applied. This means that the duty applies in full to the intelligence services, while providing confidence to the public and our international partners that sensitive national security information will continue to be protected. I particularly thank the chair and members of the Intelligence and Security Committee for their constructive work with the Government in reaching this clear and balanced position.
This Bill also establishes a legal duty for public authorities to promote and maintain high standards of ethical conduct, including having a code containing a professional duty of candour for all public servants. These codes will be rooted in the seven Nolan principles and must set out clear expectations for conduct, consequences for breaching them and routes for reporting misconduct, making protected disclosures and raising complaints. Public authorities will, in turn, have a duty to promote and maintain high standards of ethical conduct among their employees. This is a cornerstone of the Government’s approach. While codifying good practice is important, the purpose here is to go further: it is prevention. We want to create a culture in which wrongdoing is identified and confronted early, before institutional defensiveness takes hold and failures are compounded by attempts to conceal them.
Hillsborough demonstrated the terrible consequences when public servants deliberately mislead the public and the media in order to spread a false narrative. The families were denied the truth and that injustice persisted for decades. This law should provide a powerful deterrent against such conduct ever happening again. This Bill therefore creates a new offence of misleading the public. It will apply where a public authority or official intends to mislead the public, or is reckless as to that possibility, and knows or ought to know that their conduct is seriously improper. That is a deliberately high threshold. The conduct must involve significant or repeated dishonesty on matters of significant concern to the public. The act must cause or risk causing harm—whether economic, physical or psychological—and must represent a significant departure from what would have been expected of that person in carrying out their functions.
These safeguards ensure that minor or inconsequential matters are not criminalised. Likewise, legitimate activity such as undercover policing will not be affected. The offence is targeted at serious misconduct of the kind we witnessed at Hillsborough. Those convicted will face up to two years in prison and an unlimited fine.
The Bill also replaces the common-law offence of misconduct in public office with two new statutory offences: seriously improper acts and breach of the duty to prevent death or serious injury. This will bring greater clarity to the law, defining who is covered, the conduct that is captured and the consequences of abusing public office. It will ensure that officials who abuse their position or fall short of the behaviour expected of those in public office will continue to face serious consequences, including up to 10 years in prison for the offence of seriously improper acts and up to 14 years for breach of duty to prevent death or serious injury.
Let me turn to the Bill’s measures in respect of legal aid. Too many bereaved families go to inquests seeking answers about the death of a loved one, only to find themselves facing the full weight of the state. Public bodies arrive with experienced lawyers, while families without access to publicly funded support are left to represent themselves, meet the costs personally or turn to crowdfunding. This is a massive and indefensible asymmetry.
This Bill will address that profound imbalance. It will ensure greater parity by providing bereaved families with access to help and advocacy, regardless of their financial circumstances, while removing burdensome bureaucracy at one of the most difficult moments of their lives. The cost will, rightly, fall to the relevant public authorities, or their responsible government departments, where they are interested persons at an inquest. The Bill will place a duty on them to consider whether their own legal representation is necessary and proportionate, taking account of the support available to families and their obligations to support the investigation and establish the facts of what happened; but effective participation is about more than representation.
The experience of families in this situation has informed our approach, and the Bill will require guidance setting clear principles for how public authorities should participate in inquests. It will also empower coroners and inquiry chairs to raise concerns about the conduct of public authorities or their legal representatives at an inquiry or inquest. The principle is simple: an inquest or inquiry is not a contest to be won. Those representing the state should approach it not as adversaries but with sensitivity and respect, and with the proper purpose of helping to establish the truth, learn lessons and provide bereaved families with the answers they deserve.
The measures I have set out today are substantial but the principles behind them are simple: first, that we should create a culture in our public institutions that prevents failures happening in the first place; and, secondly, that where something does go wrong, the truth must come out—fully, candidly and without delay, because delay has a cost. Every year spent fighting for answers is another year in which families live with uncertainty, their grief prolonged by unanswered questions. Difficult truths are always painful, but concealing them, or allowing them to emerge only after years of struggle, prolongs and significantly compounds that pain.
This House brings formidable experience to the issues addressed by the Bill, and I know noble Lords will want to scrutinise it closely. I can say on behalf of the Government that we will approach that scrutiny constructively. I look forward to hearing contributions from across the House today and to working closely with noble Lords as the Bill proceeds to the later stages.
We cannot undo the injustices that brought us here, or the pain and anguish endured by those who, through no fault of their own, were forced to fight for the truth, but we can learn from all this. We can seek to prevent the failures of the past happening again. We can ensure that when public institutions do fail, the instinct of the state is not to close ranks or to wait to be challenged but to come forward, tell the truth, account for what went wrong and put it right. I beg to move.
Lord Keen of Elie (Con)
My Lords, I begin by paying tribute to the families of those who died at the Hillsborough tragedy in 1989. Their decades-long campaign for justice and accountability has demonstrated a resilience and dignity that should inspire us all. I am sure noble Lords are united in the determination that such a disaster should not happen again and that if such a situation were to reoccur, the institutions of the state should act with transparency and honesty. That is the spirit in which I rise to speak on this Bill today.
Before turning to specific provisions, I must note something about the legislative journey of the Bill. In 2024, it was promised as one of the first Acts of this Government, and yet here we are two years later still debating the provisions. It is a Bill that now looks very different from its original proposals. At the very least, this speaks to the genuine complexity of balancing the duty of candour with the imperatives of national security. Despite the long wait to get to this point, the Government’s amendments addressing intelligence services were proposed with little more than 24 hours’ notice before the Commons scrutiny. This is arguably one of the most important areas of the Bill, with serious potential ramifications for safety and national security. Whatever one’s view on those amendments, they deserve more careful consideration than that timeframe allowed. It is therefore the duty of this House to provide the detailed and deliberate scrutiny that the Commons schedule did not permit.
I thank the Minister for engaging constructively with the concerns we raised. His recent letter to me engaging with some of my early concerns, and his willingness to meet with me ahead of this debate, demonstrate that the Government are prepared to engage in genuine dialogue. The questions I raise today are therefore presented in a spirit of collaboration and constructive feedback. We seek to understand the Bill better, not to obstruct it. With that in mind, I turn to several matters that merit the Minister’s attention.
The first is the scope and operation of the duty of candour. Clause 1 sets out the purpose of the Bill, but the duty of candour itself is framed in expansive and potentially uncertain language: to act
“with candour, transparency and frankness … promptly and proactively; with full disclosure of evidence—and without favour”
to one’s own position. This raises important questions about when this duty is engaged and how it operates in practice.
Clause 2 requires a person to notify an inquiry that their acts or information may be relevant. When is a person subject to this obligation? Is it constantly triggered, or only when an inquiry has been formally established? The Minister’s letter helpfully suggests that this obligation can be “switched off” depending on circumstances—for instance, in a large inquiry, where it would be impractical to require all potential witnesses to come forward—but what mechanism exists to switch it off? Who decides to switch off this obligation? What recourse does an individual have if they believe the obligation has been wrongly triggered or applied?
Furthermore, Clause 3 provides that the duty does not require breaching obligations under other legislation. However, the Bill creates many new duties. I would be grateful if the Minister could explain whether the duty of candour interacts with existing statutory duties—for example, the duty of candour already embedded in National Health Service regulations and the Freedom of Information Act’s exemptions. I also invite the Minister to explain whether any guidance or code of practice is planned to clarify these interactions.
The Bill as drafted also raises issues relating to evidential burdens and the long-standing right against self-incrimination. Clause 2 contemplates the extension of the duty of candour to “other investigations” beyond inquiries, and it would appear that this might include police misconduct investigations. However, here we face a potential difficulty: if a public official is required under Clause 2 to disclose information or acts in the course of an investigation, and if they decline to do so without good reason, they may face prosecution under Clause 5. Yet if that investigation subsequently becomes criminal in nature, that same official might face the consequence of self-incrimination. The Bill does not require an official to incriminate themselves, but it does inadvertently create a trap whereby an official must choose between incriminating themselves or facing prosecution for a breach of the Clause 2 duty.
I have been told that the Bill does not intend to compel criminals to self-incriminate, but I must confess that I remain unclear as to how this will work in practice. Perhaps the Minister can provide clarification today on the interplay between the duty of candour and the privilege against self-incrimination.
Clause 6 has also been a source of concern. I know that other noble Lords are taking a close interest in this part of the Bill so I will not go into it in detail, other than to say that the burden placed on the security services must be closely monitored to ensure that they are properly resourced and that their operational requirements will not be constrained by this further burden on their resources. There will also need to be a means of assuring foreign services with whom we exchange intelligence that this legislation will not weaken control of sensitive material. Rather than simply saying that existing safeguards will be sufficient, it would be better for the Government to provide clear guidance on how existing controls will be operated under this new regime. I expect we will return to this in Committee.
I turn to Clause 10, which imposes a duty on public authorities to promote standards of ethical conduct. I would be grateful if the Minister could indicate, either today or in writing before Committee, what analysis the Government have undertaken on the costs of this requirement and what assessments have been made of its likely effectiveness. There is always the risk of a further bureaucratic burden being placed on authorities which are not properly resourced.
Finally, I turn to some suggestions for the Minister for the creation of certain new offences to improve public official accountability. The Bill creates new statutory offences to replace the common-law offence of misconduct in public office. These include the offence of misleading the public under Clause 11 and the offence of seriously improper acts under Clause 12. We are anxious to explore whether these provisions adequately capture two scenarios: first, the deliberate misleading of a Minister by a civil servant; and secondly, the deliberate destruction of documents by a public official. These are grave matters and I am unclear as to whether the proposed new offences would capture them. I would be grateful to the Minister if he could explain the Government’s perception of these issues.
The Bill addresses matters that are of profound importance to public trust in state institutions and the House has a duty to scrutinise it carefully. I am confident that, with the Minister’s continued engagement, we will do so constructively. I look forward to further discussion in Committee.
Baroness Hamwee (LD)
My Lords, I am a stand-in for my noble friend Lord Marks, who is sorry he cannot be here today. These Benches support the Bill. My noble friends, including a Liverpool voice, and other noble Lords will speak from involvement with various issues or scandals. However, we have concerns. The Bill should extend as far as the public would expect, be fully and straightforwardly enforceable, and be not only reactive but proactive. We look forward to working with the Minister, whom I welcome to his new position. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, for all that she must have done in the preparation of the Bill.
Ethical conduct and candour should not need saying, but from the catalogue of disasters—not only what has lent the Bill its informal title—they clearly do. I echo the admiration expressed for the determination and sheer grit of the survivors of those disasters, their families and campaigners. I am glad to see the Nolan principles embedded; as we go through the Bill, we might test each provision against them. In a way, it is a pity it is not left at that. The more that is spelled out, the more significant is what is not. The Bill tells us what a public authority must do “in particular”. Lists are not exhaustive, but, leaving aside the technicalities of drafting, they will be the focus and so must be complete.
To fulfil the “purpose” in Clause 1, enabling whistleblowing in safety is essential. Otherwise, candour is muzzled and the duty incomplete. The Bill needs to prevent problems. A comprehensive whistleblowing policy, including a duty to investigate concerns, should not be optional.
So often, we hear from victims: “No one in future should have to experience this”. They and the campaigners working alongside them, over such long periods, are to be congratulated. What a powerful phrase is that of the right reverend James Jones:
“The patronising disposition of unaccountable power”—
so apt for the feeling of impotence that so many have had to battle.
I would be grateful if the Minister could explain the involvement in the new regime—“landscape” might be a better term—of the Independent Public Advocate. GOV.UK prefaces the policy statement regarding the IPA with the explanation that it was
“published under the 2024 to 2026 Starmer Labour government”.
Is that some sort of disclaimer or distancing? I have seen it elsewhere. The IPA should be fully involved and adequately resourced to fulfil her role, which is complementary to what the Bill introduces.
The scope, in the non-technical sense, of the Bill must reflect the realities. Public authorities do not do everything themselves; they use subcontractors, who use sub-subcontractors, and so on. There are agency workers too. It is not just a chain; it is a web. The Government have said that it would not be proportionate to subject all such bodies to the duty to adopt a code of ethical conduct and that the appropriate national authority will target relevant sectors. We need to unpack that and perhaps rebuild it.
That responsibility must land appropriately has been highlighted by the recent report that the manufacturer of the cladding of Grenfell Tower has, in settling an action by its shareholders, paid them very considerably more than it paid to the families of those who died. That may not be directly relevant to the Bill but I wanted to say it, and that the whole state needs to play its part, whether or not it is a matter of candour. As we were reminded by headlines at the weekend, former postmasters and their families are still being frustrated in their efforts to overturn convictions and get proper compensation. Of course, we want to prevent the need for compensation.
What is directly relevant is what public authorities are required to do to maintain high standards of conduct. We want mandatory guidance on compliance with the code and mandatory regulation requiring compliance with standards. I was struck by the CQC’s experience: it refers to differences in the quality of the duty of candour in services rated outstanding and good compared with lower gradings. Ethical standards are integral to successful services.
National security will occupy some of our time. The Minister told the Commons that arrangements for some inquiries “remain available” and that existing practices, such as the use of security-vetted counsel, “can continue”. I have never felt entirely comfortable with arrangements for special advocates. Like their clients, they must rarely feel entirely satisfied with what they can achieve, given the constraints of closed material procedure. I am with Lord Bingham that their task is like taking blind shots at a hidden target, but I suppose there is no perfect solution.
With the end of the legislation in sight, the focus will be implementation. If that is not effective then the rest is in vain, so the House will not be surprised that we are concerned about legal aid—not only resources and rates but the capacity of the profession and the detail of the scheme, which does not recognise the complexity of, for instance, the work entailed in an inquest and the amount of work required outside the hearing itself.
Many of our points on the duty of candour are also relevant to the misconduct in public office provisions—inevitably, because this is also about ethics and accountability. Who is a “public” officeholder? What about private contractors and marrying up the duty with regulation? The “reasonable excuse” defence takes us into the territory of the reverse burden of proof, making the defence clearer and not setting an exceptionally high burden for the prosecution.
I am persuaded that the Bill should align with the Bribery Act, that someone who is not a public official but instigates misconduct should be covered, and that the offence should not be dependent on a benefit having been obtained. This should be about prevention.
Finally, to provide for parity at inquiries including inquests is a logical application of the underlying thinking. We must ensure that the reality achieves the objectives.
We all have an interest in a duty of candour. Its application is relevant to me for a particular reason—which is rather indulgent, I may say. I have a Private Member’s Bill—it has had its Second Reading, so I suppose it is now the property of the House—which deals with the conduct of undercover police and intelligence operatives. Listening to some of the women deceived into relationships by spy cops has given me some insight into institutional defensiveness, and the layers of issues and of the ranks of people who have not been governed by ethics. It is a reminder that when something goes wrong, prevaricating or denying it compounds the damage. And that damage can be so corrosive.
My noble friend Lord Marks has not signed off this speech. He will have plenty to say, and more cogently, in the next stages.
Baroness Manningham-Buller (CB)
My Lords, like others who are going to speak in this debate, I start by acknowledging the pain of the victims whose grief and distress were compounded by the failure of the state. That is why we are here.
This legislation, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, mentioned, has had a long and difficult gestation, caused partly by the difficulty in some cases of how to maintain a duty of candour alongside a duty of confidentiality and to maintain secrets.
I wish to make three points. I am afraid the first one is pretty obvious, but there has been an awful lot of ill-informed commentary on this and I cannot avoid it. As you would expect, my main concern is that national security is not damaged. There are two aspects to this: first, the vulnerability of intelligence, which can be destroyed by slight references to it. I am going to be rather vain and quote from a speech I made in the Robing Room in 2010. Excuse me doing so, but in a moment, I am going to quote the noble Lord, Lord Butler—so somebody of greater authority. I said
“intelligence is vulnerable. Individuals supplying it can be exposed, interrogated and killed. Our duty is to protect them. Operations can be compromised, techniques blown, ciphers changed. The targets of intelligence learn and improve their own techniques to conceal their actions from the authorities”.
This means that intelligence must be protected and safeguarded, which is why systems have been developed so that intelligence can be safely used in court cases and in public inquiries—including with special advocates, who I think have been very successful—in such a way that the material can be germane to the conclusions of the court case or the inquiry but the most sensitive aspects of it protected. So, we have closed material sessions, public interest immunity certificates, special advocates and the ability to request that an inquiry becomes statutory, which gives it those protections. The British intelligence community has lots of experience of that.
There is also a second point on intelligence, which is often overlooked. Here—copyright of the noble Lord, Lord Butler, and his report into the weapons of mass destruction in 2004—this is really important, because it partly explains the way the Act is drafted, so that individual members of the services—the intelligence community—do not report externally but it goes through the head of the service. The noble Lord said:
“The most important limitation on intelligence is its incompleteness. Much ingenuity and effort is spent on making secret information difficult to acquire and hard to analyse. Although the intelligence process may overcome such barriers, intelligence seldom acquires the full story. In fact, it is often … sporadic and patchy, and even after analysis may … be at best inferential”.
What that means is that much is clear only with hindsight, that challenging decisions on where to focus resources are standard and that even the most knowledgeable intelligence officers and analysts may reach very different conclusions on the same material.
There is also, of course, the practice of need-to-know, again to protect material internally, so that not everybody has the full picture. I believe that the safety mechanisms in the Bill for that area of our work, as it stands, are adequate.
The second thing I want to talk about is ethics. I applaud what my noble friend Lord Evans of Weardale said in the debate which the noble Lord, Lord Alton, triggered earlier in the year on this subject. The Nolan principles—I used to remember them off by heart; I can usually get to six of them—are still pretty good. They date from 1995. They are not complete; there is nothing about how you behave towards other people, but they are still very important principles which I grew up on from 1995 onwards. I strongly support the view in the Bill that all public authorities should promote and actively maintain ethical standards, articulating what they are. Of course, intelligence work, as much other work, raises ethical issues—there is very little in government that does not—but we sought to maintain ethical standards. We certainly articulated them; sometimes we fell short, as organisations do.
When I was there, we appointed an ethics counsellor. We had ethics built into discussions on operations, but if that was not sufficient, staff could raise issues with the ethics counsellor—the appointment still exists—and the issues raised would be brought to the board and considered. This is particularly important in an organisation which within the law has the powers to intrude into people’s privacy and do some quite interesting things.
The final of my three points is that there are no extra resources to do this. Front-line staff will be taken off current work to service these demands—to service, if you like, the past rather than preventing the future. That is a real concern to me.
I am, though, pleased by the involvement of the Intelligence and Security Committee. It is sometimes assumed that this was imposed on the intelligence community—I look at the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, who leads it at the moment. In fact, it was sought by my service for many years before we got it, and I see the noble Lord, Lord Butler, nodding, because we valued the idea of parliamentary scrutiny of what we were doing. The Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office being involved is also important.
Finally, I want to thank the noble Lord, Lord Lemos, who rang me in a red stripy T-shirt in the middle of August on the hottest day and spent a good amount of time—I was equally smartly dressed—talking about the Bill and what it is trying to do. If I am ending on a flippant note, I do not mean to suggest that this is not very important legislation; I look forward to engagement at all subsequent stages of the Bill.
The Lord Bishop of Manchester
My Lords, I declare my interest as co-chair of the ethics committee of the National Police Chiefs’ Council. I heartily welcome the Bill. I have spoken in this House on previous occasions regarding the need for a wide duty of candour. I am delighted that we are now making substantial progress.
The role of public officials is and always must be one of stewardship, not dominance. To remain effective, this relationship demands the ongoing consent of the people, and that is possible only through honesty, transparency and the means for communities to get to the truth when things go wrong. This necessitates a higher standard of conduct for authorities which wield greater powers and capabilities. It requires resources to level the playing field when victims seek justice. This relationship is a fragile one, but it must be carefully maintained if public authorities are to retain the respect and trust of the people they serve. The introduction of a statutory duty of candour and transparency will be an important step towards strengthening this relationship and empowering the people to hold officials accountable when that trust is broken.
As a young priest and industrial chaplain in Rotherham, I was deployed to the Hillsborough stadium when the clergy who had been present at the match were stood down. The sight of the thick, metal crush barriers at the Leppings Lane end, twisted out of shape by the sheer weight of human flesh and bone pressing down on them, still haunts me almost four decades on.
The bereaved families I met at the stadium were desperate to know why their loved ones had perished. I could listen to their concerns, I could—and did—offer my pastoral support, but I had no answers to their questions as to how the tragedy could have happened. In contrast to the welcome my colleagues and I received at the stadium, a few days later when I offered my services at the local police station, knowing that many officers would have been present and traumatised, I was told bluntly that outsiders were not welcome. That itself told a story.
Almost immediately, and for years to come, supporters were blamed for the tragedy, accused of drunkenness and of arriving intentionally late and without tickets. It was against this backdrop of deflected blame that the families of the victims bore responsibility to campaign for the truth of what happened that day—a process that took them many decades and came at enormous emotional and financial cost. The vulnerable and grieving should never carry the weight of securing accountability on their own; nor should the burden of proof fall on the bereaved at a time of such great loss.
In this House and far beyond, we all owe a great debt of gratitude to my right reverend friend, Bishop James Jones, a former Member of this House, who has already been mentioned. He worked long and hard, including facing down severe political pressure, to complete and present his report on Hillsborough. It nearly did not happen; he was nearly stopped. Drawing on his conclusions, I strongly support the commitment to assign additional public expenditure to legal aid for bereaved family members, ensuring equal and fair participation in the course of justice.
In my own diocese in my time as Bishop, we have witnessed another profound tragedy: the Manchester Arena attack. The circumstances were very different, but it demonstrated the same important principle: bereaved families, and those injured and maimed physically and psychologically, deserve access to the truth, and transparency and accountability are essential for victims to seek true justice.
In Manchester, after an initial locally commissioned inquiry had been substantially thwarted by a failure of candour, a second statutory inquiry was established. It examined security failures, emergency response shortcomings and lessons for the future. Families were active participants in the inquiry. Many of the lessons it established were drawn directly from their experiences.
Nothing can erase the suffering that the victims and their families experienced that day and in the years that have followed, but I believe that we eventually reached a point where the protection of the public, and the needs of the bereaved and injured, were no longer consistently left playing second fiddle to the reputation of public authorities. I hope that the introduction of a legal duty to assist in such investigations may enable victims and families to get real answers that they can trust and to get them much more quickly than in the past.
By a quirk of history, before my time in Rotherham, I served close to the Orgreave coking plant during the 1985-86 miners’ strike, and many of the miners were my parishioners. That incident pre-dates Hillsborough, but it has taken until the past few months for a much-needed inquiry to be set up. My right reverend friend the Bishop of Sheffield, who is unable to be in his place today, is chairing that inquiry. I pray—and I mean that—that, even before this Bill is enacted, all those who are called to give evidence before him will operate within the spirit of candour for which it seeks to make statutory provision.
As the Bill moves forward, there are a couple of matters of detail that I will seek to follow. First, I am keen to see how we properly protect public sector whistleblowers. All too often, those who first draw attention to wrongdoing pay a heavy personal price and their careers are wrecked. Secondly, I hope we can maintain the application of the duty of candour to private sector bodies that are contracted to provide services on behalf of a public body all the way down the sometimes lengthy subcontracting chain. The duty must not be amended in your Lordships’ House in ways that would incentivise the outsourcing of functions in order to get round the Bill’s aims and purposes.
In times of great tragedy, communities are held together through trust, dignity and mutual care. We found that in Manchester in 2017. We all—public officers and citizens alike—have a responsibility to care for one another, to seek out justice and to rebuild. When authority figures are not held properly accountable, and denial and defensiveness are enabled, our communities are further fragmented. The mutual respect that binds our communities can be maintained only through transparency, accountability and ongoing public scrutiny. The Bill will go a long way towards strengthening the principles of moral leadership and trust that empower our public officers to serve the people effectively. Once we have given it our thorough consideration—as we must—I pray that it will be enacted, and all its provisions commenced, as swiftly as possible.
Lord Beamish (Lab)
I begin my speech with one thought in my mind: the 97 individuals who lost their lives on 15 April 1989 at Hillsborough, and their families and friends. It is through the tenacious campaign of those families and friends that we are here today. What occurred on 15 April 1989 was a shameful saga. It stains our nation. Various parts of the state colluded to cover up the truth and, worse, blamed the victims of the tragedy for the events. Clearly, that added grief to the already grieving families, not only immediately but over many years. It is a tribute to them—and they have never given up on getting the truth—that we are discussing this Bill today. Let us hope that the Bill becomes a living legacy for the victims of that tragedy. It is beholden on us to scrutinise the Bill in detail and to make sure that we get it on the statute book as quickly as possible.
If Hillsborough was a lone event, that would be a serious issue, but it was not; there have been countless events where cover-ups by the state have led not only to victims not getting justice but to them having to fight for many years. I have been involved in fighting for justice for sub-postmasters with my good friend, the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot. For the last 15 years, we have been working to help expose the truth around the Post Office Horizon scandal.
Like the Hillsborough families, the victims of that scandal were lied to. Things were covered up; decent and hard-working individuals not only lost their livelihoods but went to prison; and 13 tragically took their own lives, including Martin Griffiths, who stepped in front of a bus, as highlighted in the ITV drama documentary. Added to that has been the mental trauma of the families and children of those affected. I am very pleased that the Government are now recognising that by providing compensation to them.
As I said, it would be bad enough if Hillsborough was the only tragedy, but it is not. The Post Office scandal has been called one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in this country. It is the state—the Post Office lied, the state lied. The Government hid behind the fact that the Post Office was an arm’s-length entity to not put forward the truth. They spent £100 million of taxpayers’ money to defend the indefensible when the postmasters took them to court. Obviously, that led to the truth finally coming out. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, will say in his contribution that over the years, the facts were there but we were just lied to. Parliament was lied to. Therefore, I welcome the Bill and hope that it will shed some light and change the culture. It is not just about individual institutions but about looking across the public sector.
In the Post Office case, with the duty of candour, you would have thought that once the scandal broke after the court case the Post Office would be forthcoming. It was not. It took it another three years to admit—I and others campaigned to highlight it—that there was a system that was used previously to Horizon, called Capture. We are still fighting for justice for those individuals. The Government have provided compensation, but 27 are still waiting for their convictions to be overturned through the Criminal Cases Review Commission. I urge the Government to follow the last Government’s approach to Horizon on those.
Should this Bill be needed? No, it should not, if we were in an open and honest situation. But we are not. We have situations here where the state, or various parts of it—it is a cultural issue—have come together not only to deny the truth but, on occasions, to lie and cover their tracks.
I turn to the point around the security services, as chair of the ISC. As the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, said, we have been very closely involved in this Bill. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, asked why it has taken so long. It has taken so long because it has been very important to get it right. I just echo the point from the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller: the security services, under the procedures that are in place at the moment, are content that they will protect those agents. The important point is that it is not the individual agents who will have a duty of candour; it will be the agency heads.
Having spent many hours not only with the committee but also just me and the deputy chair in discussions with agency heads and the families, I think we have come to a point now where we can recognise that it does cover the agencies, but also puts in place very clear safeguards—that are already there, actually—to ensure that the secrets to which the noble Baroness referred to are protected. From the ISC’s point of view, we are content, as the Bill stands at the moment, that there are enough protections in place to cover our security services.
This is the last point I would like to make. I mentioned the word “culture”, and it needs to change. I do not think, to be honest, that this is the end. We also need to look at the inquiries issue. It takes far too long for victims to get justice. Compensation has to be reinvented every time. I know that Professor Christopher Hodges, who is the chair of the Horizon compensation advisory board, has been doing some work with government to look at whether we need a beefed-up ombudsman with parliamentary oversight to ensure that inquiries do not go on and victims get justice far more quickly, as they should.
In closing, I just say that passing this Bill is important, and let us hope that, from the tragic events of 1989, some good comes.
Baroness May of Maidenhead (Con)
My Lords, the Minister reminded us that, sadly, there have over the years been all too many examples of the abuse of state power, when those in public service have decided to act in a way that serves their institution, or indeed themselves, rather than the public whom they are there to serve. But, despite all those many examples, we must never forget, as other speakers have already referred to, that the origin of this legislation lies on the pitch at Hillsborough on 15 April 1989. We owe it to the 97 who died, and their families who have campaigned for so many decades, to make sure that we get this Bill right and that it will work.
There has been a focus in some of the commentary on the issues of inquiries and investigations. But, of course, the lies, the manipulation of the facts and the misinformation at Hillsborough did not start at the inquest or at the independent panel; they started on and off the pitch on the day, 15 April 1989. That is why the wider issue of the duty of candour is so important, as is the aspect of the new legislation that the Government are introducing on misconduct in public office. Getting that right really matters for all those who have been affected by these abuses of state power over the years.
There are two particular aspects of the Bill that I will focus on. The first is the protected information that has been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, and the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, who both have significant experience in this area. I recognise that this is a conundrum. There is a need to ensure that people can get to the truth while at the same time protecting our national security interests, and there has been much debate about this. I recognise from the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, that the ISC’s view is that this section of the Bill is adequate and appropriate. I am very grateful to the Minister and his officials for meeting me and my noble friend Lady Sanderson of Welton last week, when we were able to discuss some of these issues. But I fear that this section of the Bill—Clause 6—is rather cumbersome, and the more cumbersome a piece of legislation is, the more opportunity there will be for mistakes to be made and for unintended consequences, and the more resources will be required.
I do not know whether the Government have made any attempt to consider what the resource implications for the relevant public authorities of this aspect of the Bill could be. It is important that we ensure not just that we get to the truth and that people who are affected by abuses of the state are able to get to that truth but that intelligence and information that is necessary to keep us all safe can circulate to the relevant public authorities, our security services and others who deal with national security issues.
The noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, referred to special advocates. I think they have worked extremely well, and are a very good example of a way in which these two issues of national security and getting to the truth can be met, so we can ensure that we meet those two objectives. I look forward to further debate on this and to probing aspects such as, in Clause 6(8), what happens if an application is made and rejected. The Bill is silent on this, but the Minister may wish at some stage to respond on that point.
There is one aspect of the Bill which I am very sad about. It is that the Independent Public Advocate is not referred to in this Bill. The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, has already referred to the IPA. In an ideal situation, there will be circumstances where it will not be necessary to move to a public inquiry; if the Independent Public Advocate can work with the families who are affected by a mistake by the state, they can get to the truth at an early stage and there will be no need to move to an inquiry.
One of the complaints that I heard long and hard from the Hillsborough families at a very early stage in my time as Home Secretary was that there was nobody there for them: nobody on their side. The Independent Public Advocate is the person who will be on their side; who will be their voice; who will be campaigning for them; who will be working to knock down the barriers of bureaucracy that the state puts in place to try to stop the truth coming out. If we are going to look at this holistically, we need to ensure that the Independent Public Advocate is referenced in the Bill. Indeed, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, has said, the resources available to the Independent Public Advocate, whether they are part-time or full-time, is another issue that needs to be addressed. The IPA is part of this picture and should be in the Bill because, together, the Bill and the IPA could mean that, in the future, no one affected by abuses and mistakes of the state should wait decades for the truth, no one will feel that they are on their own in fighting for the truth, and, above all, the state will be on the side of the public whom it serves.
Lord Blunkett (Lab)
It is my privilege to follow the noble Baroness and to commend the part she played as Home Secretary and Prime Minister in listening to the families. I hope the House will forgive me for reiterating words that have already been used this afternoon, but I have been reflecting personally over the last year or two on the 1989 disaster and whether I could have done a great deal more afterwards as the Member of Parliament in whose constituency the Hillsborough stadium is located.
The commendations that have already been made to the families and campaigners, who have shown the most incredible tenacity and commitment to bringing about change, need to be reiterated, because making democracy work when you are suffering as they have suffered, with the emotion that they have felt, has been the most impressive yet tragic element of modern British democracy.
I was not at the game—I was a very new MP for the area, and it was a semi-final—but my father-in-law-to-be was, and, to his death, he remembered it as though it was yesterday. My wife-to-be was a volunteer at the Sheffield Hallam Hospital, as a doctor, and I went to the Northern General Hospital and spoke to some of the 766 young men and women who were injured on that day.
We were briefed by the police entirely wrongly. To this day I am grateful that, for once, I did not believe the police; other Members of Parliament did. The lies that were told on that day are a stain on the South Yorkshire Police and the force in general, but they do not need to be a stain on the community I was proud to represent. I am saying this because, out of that terrible day and the immediate aftermath, the humanity and commitment of local people also needs to be remembered. There were those who took people from Merseyside back to their homes because cars were not usable and the tragedy had brought such emotional trauma; people who had lost their keys; people who, in those days, did not have a mobile phone and had to use local landlines. I say this only because sometimes, we need to balance the terrible things with the humanity that also emerges.
I want to pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Wills, who will speak in a moment. When I was a very new Member of this House, he brought forward his Private Member’s Bill, and I was pleased to be a sponsor of it. As I said a moment ago, I have reflected on how little I did as Home Secretary, and I regret that deeply, because the time it has taken to bring about this Bill, and the recognition that goes with it, could have been shortened enormously if some of us had taken more responsibility at that time. Two Prime Ministers now have played their part. The current Prime Minister, my friend, paid tribute to Sir Keir Starmer in the Commons earlier this afternoon, and I pay tribute to Andy Burnham. He learned a terrific political lesson on the 20th anniversary, in 2009, at Anfield. Some of us have learned lessons like that over the years, and it is seminal.
I want to say two or three things about the Bill. First, the noble Baronesses, Lady Hamwee and Lady May, mentioned the Independent Public Advocate, who is here this afternoon. Unless this role is properly funded and supported, and unless the powers are adequate, it will not work. As the noble Baroness, Lady May, said, this is not about taking things to yet another public inquiry; it is about getting to the truth quickly and decisively and bringing justice in that way.
The second issue is the security services, which have been mentioned already this afternoon. As Home Secretary, I was painfully aware of the sacrifice that many people made and the danger in which they put themselves. So getting this right will be important in ensuring not just that they cannot escape from actions that are totally unethical, but that we do it in a way that safeguards our national well-being.
This is not about the legislation itself; it is about getting people to act ethically, and not to be dealt with by legislative process. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester mentioned not only his early time and his terrible experience in South Yorkshire all those years ago, which I have spoken about, but the work he is doing with the National Police Chiefs’ Council. The noble Lord, Lord Herbert, and I were painfully aware during the nine-month inquiry we undertook into the leadership of the police service in Britain that there is a desperate need for the ethics to be built into everyday life.
I say to my good friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, that there will be a cost, but the cost will be much less if people themselves take responsibility and act not just with humanity but with the ethics that ensure that those around them are not permitted to act fraudulently and against the best interests of the community.
Finally, I ask my noble friend on the Front Bench, will he make sure that in reopening the stages of the Nottingham foundation trust inquiry, people are made to give evidence rather than escaping by having taken other jobs?
Baroness Ludford (LD)
My Lords, I start with apologies for the fact that I am commuting between the Chamber and the Grand Committee because of my involvement in the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill.
I very much welcome this Bill and profoundly thank the campaigners, survivors and bereaved families of Hillsborough, Grenfell, Post Office Horizon, infected blood, Windrush, nuclear testing, LGB personnel in the Armed Forces, grooming gangs, pelvic mesh and other scandals. With such a long list and long processes, one wonders: is the British state uniquely bad at preventing and righting injustices?
The vow is “never again”. However, at the end of my remarks, I will raise fears about other areas where similar issues might be arising, even if they are not yet generally recognised as scandals.
I worry that the Bill puts the chicken before the egg. Arguably, Parts 1 and 2 need to be reversed so that the obligation of ethical conduct comes first. If ethical conduct could be embedded, many scandals and inquiries, with their suffering, heartache and expense, could be avoided. It was bad enough for people to suffer wrongful actions and miscarriages of justice, but even worse that these became examples of institutional defensiveness, denial, obfuscation, delay and, as both the present Prime Minister and previous ones have said, cover-ups.
I remind those who oppose the ECHR, such as those on the Benches to my right—who are even excluding from their party candidates who are sensible on this issue—that it was because of the operation of the European Convention on Human Rights, the European Court of Human Rights and the Human Rights Act that inquests were reformed and justice was done for Hillsborough victims and others. This powerfully demonstrates how human rights can improve the lives of ordinary people. But as my colleague in the other place, Jess Brown-Fuller, put it:
“the path to truth was blocked by people in positions of power and trust”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/11/25; col. 668.]
Victims of miscarriages of justice want the truth, even if they have to wait a long time for it. Last week, in relation to Greenlandic women who had contraceptive devices inserted without consent, Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, said: “I believe it is never too late to do the right thing”.
Justice is something people want, alongside truth and accountability. As Labour MP Ian Byrne pointed out in the other place:
“by 2020—31 years after Hillsborough—no public servant had been convicted, and no police officer disciplined. In fact, Norman Bettison, who was absolutely central to the cover-up, not only escaped sanction but was rewarded with a knighthood for his efforts—a title he disgracefully retains to this day. So yes, we got the truth, but justice? No”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/11/25; cols. 680.]
We need individual accountability and liability for senior people.
Other colleagues will raise issues such as whistleblowing protections and parity of legal representation, so I will spend the rest of my time mentioning other areas of policy and practice where I fear scandals are brewing. They include the treatment of leaseholders, whether over works to address fire risks post-Grenfell or rip-off service charges from tax haven-based freehold owners and rapacious managing agents.
Then I fear that “gender-affirming care” may end up as an NHS scandal like infected blood. Journalist Nick Wallis, who did a lot of work on the Post Office Horizon scandal, wrote in the Sunday Times at the weekend in the wake of NHS Wales designating the Welsh Gender Service a “potential service of concern”. He described the
“NHS enthusiasm for gender ideology”
as
“a form of medical malpractice”.
He went on to say:
“When the growing number of people who feel they have been ruined by gender surgery begin to find their voices, we’ll see more legal claims against the NHS and the individual doctors responsible. Only then will the true horrors of this industry be exposed”.
I also believe that employers and service providers that refuse to provide single-sex facilities under the Equality Act, as confirmed by the Supreme Court, might in future be exposed to accountability and liability for knowingly and deliberately flouting the law.
With regard to sentences of imprisonment for public protection, I said in a debate on the Sentencing Bill:
“This is not a technical issue, it is an ethical issue, and we are all begging the Minister to deliver the justice that has been called for from all sides of the House this afternoon ”.—[Official Report, 3/12/25; col. 1812.]
So I very much welcome the announcement by the Prime Minister and, I believe, the Justice Secretary—I am not sure whether he has done it yet—anticipating legislation to end these sentences by the end of this Parliament. Marc Conway, the CEO of the NGO UNGRIPP—the United Group for Reform of IPP—reacted by saying:
“Legislation alone cannot undo 20 years of damage, but it is the essential first step toward healing”.
An editorial in the Independent, whose reporter has done sterling work raising awareness of the injustice of IPP sentences, said:
“Assuming there’s no inquiry into how this regime was allowed to continue despite known flaws, there needs now to be at least some accountability on the part of those concerned: the ministers, civil servants, lawyers. Why did they tolerate this for so long?”
Finally, I refer to the case of two former senior judges who are colleagues of ours in this House. Although retired from judicial service in this country, they continue to sit on Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal, as highlighted in the Times today. Their presence once reinforced constitutionalism and human rights, but now that China has reshaped the legal system in Hong Kong to serve the Chinese Communist Party, with 1,900 political prisoners jailed, I contend that their continued service legitimises repression—including that of British citizen Jimmy Lai, whose appeal, with six other pro-democracy activists, against convictions for taking part in peaceful protest was dismissed by that court in 2024. When Lord Sumption left the Hong Kong court two years ago, he warned that the territory was
“slowly becoming a totalitarian state”.
I understand that this can be only a personal decision of the noble and learned Lords concerned. There may be nothing in law, in the rules of this House or, indeed, in this Bill to prevent them from continuing to sit on the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal. I none the less hope that the principles of this welcome Bill might reverberate beyond its strict scope, including in this case.
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.
Lord Howard of Lympne (Con)
My Lords, I have never been able to find the words to describe the calamitous events that took place at Hillsborough on 15 April 1989. I join with others in expressing, as I have previously done, my deepest sympathy with the families of those who lost their lives on that terrible day. I intervene in this debate to support the principle of the legislation before your Lordships and to explain some of the difficulties that Ministers face when our institutions—institutions in which, for the most part, we take great pride—fail to deliver justice.
At the inquest, the coroner—controversially, and wrongly—excluded all evidence into what happened after 3.15 pm on the day of the tragedy, and verdicts of accidental death were returned. The outcome of that inquest was challenged by way of judicial review, but the court upheld the verdict of the inquest and specifically held that the cut-off point imposed by the coroner was not unreasonable. The families of the victims, as we have heard, continued, with incredible and sustained determination, to press for a public inquiry.
It was against that background that, as Home Secretary, I replied to an Adjournment debate in the House of Commons on 17 December 1996. The debate was moved by Peter Kilfoyle, the then Member for Liverpool Walton, and he called for a public inquiry. In replying to the debate, I undertook to consider all the evidence to see what could be done, and after the debate I met those family members who had come to London to hear it.
I then asked officials in the Home Office to consider just what could be done. That debate was held just a few months before the general election of 1997, and I believe that the work I commissioned led, at least in part, to the decision of my successor, Jack Straw, to ask Lord Justice Stuart-Smith to examine the evidence. Lord Justice Stuart-Smith, very regrettably, came to the conclusion that there was no basis for further investigation.
It was not until the Prime Minister, who attended the 20th anniversary of the disaster at Anfield in April 2009, persuaded the then Government to set up the independent panel to examine and publish all relevant information that a public body at last arrived at a conclusion which went some way towards providing justice for the families. I pay tribute to the Prime Minister for his intervention, for which he deserves great credit. I pay tribute also to the then Bishop of Liverpool, who chaired the panel, and to the noble Lord, Lord Wills, for his part in setting it up.
We cannot be sure, and should not deceive ourselves, that the existence of a duty of candour would have prevented the dismal aftermath of the Hillsborough tragedy, but it might have done, and that is enough for me to support this Bill. Your Lordships have heard the powerful words of my noble friend Lady May and others about the importance of the Independent Public Advocate, and I hope the Minister will take careful note of those powerful words and act on them.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)
My Lords, I warmly welcome this Bill and congratulate the Government as a whole and Sir Keir Starmer for bringing it forward, albeit in a belated way. But it is very welcome that it is here. I have been incredibly moved by the power and the perception of every speaker. They have brought their own knowledge and experience to this debate.
I think I am right in saying that I am the only Member of your Lordships’ House who was present at Hillsborough on that day in April 1989. I witnessed from the main stand the horrific events as they unfolded and saw the scores of casualties being brought out from the Leppings Lane end of the stadium and laid on the pitch. I do not think anyone in the ground fully appreciated—I certainly did not—the scale of the catastrophe that had taken place. Neither were we able to guess just how long it would take for the truth finally to emerge, a process made immeasurably harder by the obstructive attitude of several police forces, particularly South Yorkshire Police. For many years it attempted to put the blame for the disaster falsely on the Liverpool fans, claiming that it had been caused by hooligans fuelled by drink. As the noble Baroness, Lady May, said in her powerful speech, that lie started on the day of the disaster itself and persisted for years and years later.
As early as August 1989, Lord Justice Taylor had published his interim report, setting out his findings on the causes of the disaster. It was highly critical of the police operation and of some of the senior officers in the South Yorkshire force responsible for the policing of the match. It concluded that
“the main reason for the disaster was the failure of police control”.
Lord Justice Taylor also addressed allegations about supporter behaviour that had appeared in some earlier media coverage, making it clear that, in his view, the actions of supporters played no part in the disaster. This was followed by the setting up of the Hillsborough Independent Panel, referred to in this debate, chaired by the right reverend James Jones, then the Bishop of Liverpool. That reported on 12 September 2012. I wish to draw the House’s attention to one particular finding:
“The Panel recommends that police force records are brought under legislative control and that police forces are added to Part II of the First Schedule to the Public Records Act 1958, thereby making them subject to the supervision of the Keeper of Public Records”.
I strongly support that recommendation. Back in 2012, and indeed still today, police records, as far as England and Wales are concerned, though not in Scotland and Northern Ireland, remain at the disposal of each force’s chief constable and the police are unaccountable for their records.
A stark example of what that could mean was contained in a further report from Bishop James, The Patronising Disposition of Unaccountable Power, published in 2017 and referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee. One family member of a Hillsborough victim reported that:
“I had a telephone call from the then South Yorkshire Chief Constable Med Hughes in the stages before the HIP was set up in 2009. During the call he said ‘I am under no obligation to disclose anything and the papers belong to me. If I wanted to I could take them into the yard and have a bonfire with them’”.
Shortly after the panel reported, the Archives & Records Association took up the mantle of campaigning on police records. Writing to me in advance of this legislation and debate, it said:
“So far it has been a frustrating failure and a sad example of how the establishment closes ranks. The police have managed to play a long game and maintain the support of Home Office civil servants and whichever party has been in power to ensure that they continue to do as they please with their own records”.
This recommendation on police records was later endorsed in July 2016 in a letter to the then Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, from the shadow Home Secretary, Andy Burnham MP. He described it as:
“Vitally important. It was accidental access to police records that enabled researchers and the families of the Hillsborough victims to uncover the extent of alleged attempts by police officers to manipulate investigations into the disaster … future researchers must have a guaranteed right to access the maximum range of police records and the police themselves must be obliged to preserve their records for public accountability purposes”.
Mr Burnham now has a new job, and I hope that he will use his authority as Prime Minister to cut through the prevarication and delay which has beset officials in handling this disgraceful sequence of events for years and achieve in government what he so courageously called for in opposition. The Public Records Act is the standard that the rest of the public sector, including the Civil Service, already operates. The infrastructure is already there. We have established recognised places of deposit for public records across England and Wales, and many police forces already archive their records in these and have an existing relationship with their local authority’s archive service. Adding police records to Schedule 2 would oblige forces and officials to move much more quickly, and chief constables would have to accept that the records their forces create and hold are public records, not their corporate or personal property.
I hope very much that my noble friend, when he replies to this debate, will say that the Government are considering this and that when I move an amendment to this effect in Committee, he will take a sympathetic view of it.
Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)
My Lords, I thank the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Lemos, for the very helpful and wide-ranging discussion we had last week. I also thank his admirable predecessor, the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, for the time she set aside to see me with the mother and sister of Andrew Devine, who were constituents of mine in 1989. Having sustained terrible injuries, Andrew died in July 2021 from complications relating to the severe brain damage he suffered during the crush, becoming the 97th Hillsborough fatality.
In the debate that I initiated in your Lordships’ House on 13 November 2025, referred to by my noble friend Lady Manningham-Buller, I referred to the hope of the Devine family that there would be one enforceable code of conduct for public officials, backed by meaningful sanctions. I raised this issue last week with the noble Lord, Lord Lemos, and I hope he will tell us what progress is being made in achieving it, and that he will commit to continue to engage with the family, and with the House, on how the code will work and what will actually be in it.
Although this Bill is, of course, about more than Hillsborough, for me the story began in the run-up to, and the days which followed, the catastrophic semifinal played on 15 April 1989. Before the match, I had sent the Government correspondence questioning the suitability of the ground at Hillsborough. In the days that followed, I began asking questions, which went without answer for years and years on end. By way of example, I wrote to Sir Cecil Clothier, then the chairman of the Police Complaints Authority, calling for an independent inquiry, and describing in my letter
“a smokescreen of propaganda aimed at diverting attention from the truth”.
In a note to the chief constable of South Yorkshire, Sir Cecil reassured him that he had done his best to “deflect”—his word—my complaint. It was, as the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, has just said, a classic example of the closing of ranks.
Repeated calls for a fully independent inquiry were similarly deflected with Jack Straw, then Home Secretary, stating in 1998—as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Howard—that new evidence did not justify a new inquiry. In 2009 the anger erupted when—as the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, mentioned—the Culture Secretary, Andy Burnham, was booed and interrupted by the crowd at an Anfield memorial service. To his eternal credit, Mr Burnham stayed and listened to the raw anger. That in turn led to the creation of the Hillsborough Independent Panel, under the diligent chairmanship of the Bishop of Liverpool, James Jones, and to the 2017 report that has been referred to, The Patronising Disposition of Unaccountable Power, and its call for the duty of candour. Shocking denialism had become unsustainable.
A Bill to achieve that purpose was then introduced by Mr Burnham, with the Hillsborough Law Now campaign launched here in Parliament in 2022. Along with others, I pay tribute to their unflagging work for truth and justice. It has been quite exemplary.
In 2024, the Joint Committee on Human Rights decided to examine the Bill. We published the report Human Rights and the Proposal for a “Hillsborough Law” and called for the duty of candour. But the JCHR, which I have the honour to chair, also called for proportionate legal aid and representation for bereaved families during inquests and inquiries to match the resources of the state. I hope the Minister will say how we are going to counter the disparity and ensure the equality of arms that other noble Lords have referred to during these proceedings.
The JCHR has also examined ways of enhancing the role of the Independent Public Advocate. I was very struck by what the noble Baroness, Lady May, and other noble Baronesses and Lords as well, had to say about this. We examined ways of enhancing the role of assisting families and victims in the immediate aftermath of major disasters. We were deeply impressed by Cindy Butts, the Independent Public Advocate, and the noble Lord, Lord Wills, both of whom accepted my invitation to give important evidence to the JCHR on her significantly underresourced role. What is the Government’s current thinking on that? During our discussion last week the Minister said, on the advice of his Bill team, that it was possible that the scope of the Bill might be broad enough here in this House for us to bring something on the independent advocate into it.
On Thursday, however, I also asked the Minister about the incorporation of the Hicks rule. In February of this year, the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, Andy Burnham and I met Jenni and Trevor Hicks, whose teenage daughters, Sarah and Victoria, both died at Hillsborough. We met for the launch of the Hicks rule campaign, calling for a legal mechanism to correct historic court records that falsely claimed that victims of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster died instantly and endured no suffering. We know that is wrong. Jenni Hicks told our meeting:
“For more than three decades, the law has recorded something about our daughters that we now know simply isn’t true. This isn’t about compensation. It’s about truth. It’s about dignity”.
That meeting was held in the same House of Lords room, Committee Room 1, where in 1992 five Law Lords ruled against Jenni and Trevor Hicks. As part of the process of accountability, how will we ensure that families facing similar battles, often going through hell, will be able to have the public record put straight when historic legal findings have been based on a farrago of lies and do not reflect the truth?
On Thursday last, I also shared with the Minister the story of a mother whose student daughter committed suicide and who is a member of the ForThe100, which campaigns for greater accountability and legal clarity in higher education. Universities and colleges of higher education are in the unusual position of being independent institutions that also exercise public functions. How they will be expected to engage with the new laws, especially at inquests after the deaths of students or, as in the case of Cambridge, for instance, academic staff? Will the duty of candour be fully engaged? I hope that the Minister will write to me, setting out clarification on that. I should declare that I have two honorary unremunerated connections with two Liverpool universities.
We know that this Bill is about a lot more than what happened at Hillsborough. That has been set out by many other noble Lords. If the Bill can bring an end to the depressingly familiar pattern of deflection, cover-ups and concealment, backed up by exemplary penalties adequate to punish outrageous conduct, legislators will at last be able to say that they have done their job and honoured the memories of those who have been the victims. I support the Bill.
Lord Falconer of Thoroton (Lab)
It is an honour and privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, who has been a stalwart supporter and advocate for the Hillsborough families, right from the time the disaster occurred. I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Lemos, to the Front Bench. We are lucky to have him in dealing with a Bill like this. I also pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Levitt, who put in a huge amount of work in relation to the Bill before the Recess.
I also pay a very profound tribute to the Hillsborough families. It is because of the Hillsborough families, and only because of them and the experience of the people who suffered at Hillsborough, that the Bill is here. It is an incredibly important Bill. It represents a fundamental shift whereby the Government and public authorities pay a price for not just a cover-up but deliberately not helping people who have the misfortune to suffer, as the Horizon postmasters and the Hillsborough families have, and as the people with infected blood have.
Test the Bill by reference to what happened in Hillsborough. The disaster was caused by a catastrophic act of negligence by the police. As the noble Baroness, Lady May, said, the very afternoon they had done that, they spread lies to the media to try to deflect blame from themselves. The former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Taylor of Gosforth, identified in his initial report that it was a catastrophic failure by the police, but that was obscured in the inquest that followed. At that inquest the public sector and in particular the police were heavily represented. The Hillsborough families who travelled from Liverpool across the Pennines to Sheffield every day that it went on—and it went on for weeks—were grotesquely underrepresented. The law is fine; it is open to all, just like the Savoy, as long as you can afford it.
This Bill deals with three of those aspects. First, on the duty of candour, it would not have been open to the South Yorkshire Police to keep all their records. They would have been obliged to reveal the documents in which they were co-ordinating the statements that the police gave to bring colour to the entirely false allegation that the fans had brought it on themselves. The duty of candour deals with that.
Secondly, the crime of misleading the public in a serious manner, which is also in the Bill, would have prevented South Yorkshire Police disseminating a false narrative to distract attention from what it had done.
Thirdly, parity of representation at an inquest would have ensured that that depressing trek across the Pennines to the first inquest, where the coroner was bamboozled into coming to the wrong conclusion, would not so easily have happened.
In looking at the Bill, we should test it against whether it achieves that which is necessary to ensure that Hillsborough and infected blood do not happen again. Remember, the infected blood scandal was state bodies deliberately allowing harm to be done to a whole range of children because those bodies made judgments—that those children were no part of—as to the cheapest way to get blood. It is a terrible story.
I have the following concerns about the Bill maybe not achieving what it is supposed to achieve. First, what is the scope of the duty of candour? Is it that, for example, the police would have to have admitted almost straightaway that they were making up a false narrative? It should be clear that admission of wrongdoing is a vital part of the duty of candour; I am not sure it says that at the moment.
Secondly, the crime of misleading the public in the way that the police do kicks in only when there is “harm” to individuals, defined as
“physical harm, psychological harm … and economic loss”,
which is not general enough. I do not want to discover that that crime would not have applied to the false narrative put into the media by South Yorkshire Police because no individual harm could be identified. It was all about protecting their own reputations, and therefore harm is not applied.
Thirdly, on the issue of representation at inquests, a provision in the Bill says that where there is a public body engaged in an inquest into how a person’s loved one has died, they are entitled to legal aid in relation to it. Is that enough to ensure parity? Anybody who has been to inquests where a whole range of public bodies are engaged has seen KCs, QCs, BCs and bars for all the public bodies and maybe one person representing the family. I am not sure what the right answer to that is, but there needs to be proper parity.
My final point is on the issue of public authorities, which I am sure will take this seriously. The person who has the obligation is the head of the public authority. How do we ensure that people such as the chief constable of South Yorkshire Police when the cover-up was happening absolutely feel it? In the States, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act made the individual carry the can. We might look at the question of whether the individual at the top of the organisation carries the can. He or she has to have a defence if they did absolutely everything they could and did not cause harm intentionally, but the way to deal with it is through the person at the top having individual responsibility. I strongly welcome this really important Bill, and I hope we can make it better.
Lord Bichard (CB)
My Lords, it is with a heavy heart that I warmly support the Bill, because when I first became a public servant, now nearly 60 years ago, I would never have anticipated that, decades later, we would need to legislate to require public officials to behave with integrity and tell the truth—but we do. That is a cause for us all to reflect on the state of our public services, for which we in this House all have some responsibility. I think I am the only former Permanent Secretary speaking today, and I feel that responsibility very deeply.
Like others, I want to congratulate those who have fought to uncover the truth and then to win support for a Bill that I hope will make the deceit, obfuscation and dishonesty that they encountered less likely in the future. I so admire what they have achieved but their fight should never have been necessary, any more than it should have been necessary for victims of the infected blood scandal. We cannot allow this to go on staining our public services in the way that it is, so this is a hugely important Bill and a hugely important moment.
Inevitably, a lot of attention has been focused on the proposed new duty on public authorities and officials to act with candour at inquiries and investigations. Equally important is the part of the Bill that imposes a new duty on them to take steps to maintain ethical conduct “at all times”. I want to say a little about that, because the real test of the Bill’s success will be whether it helps to stamp out the kind of behaviour that led to Hillsborough, infected blood and all the other tragedies that we have spoken about today. Ultimately, the Bill will be judged by whether we have fewer inquiries and the extent to which it begins to rebuild trust in our public services. Let us not forget how badly that trust has been lost.
While I wholeheartedly support Part 2, Chapter 2, in its current form it is a little open-ended, particularly with regard to the codes of conduct that all authorities will now need to publish. I want to make a few points about those codes. The first point is that we need to remember that all the failures we have talked about today occurred in spite of the existence of several well-intentioned and much-lauded codes: the Civil Service Code, the Ministerial Code and the Nolan principles. They all existed when these tragedies occurred. We need to learn that codes themselves are not a guarantee for improved behaviour, even with the welcome new accountability that the Bill introduces. Frankly, if all we are going to do is restate the Nolan principles, we will have no effect on the way in which public authorities work.
The second point is that the codes must make absolutely clear that the ultimate responsibility of public officials is not to the brand and reputation of their department, not to their senior managers and not even to Ministers. It is to citizens: the ordinary folk who suffered so badly in all these cases. That is not clear enough in the existing codes. If you want to see the consequences of that, have a closer look at the Infected Blood Inquiry. I fervently believe that the attempt to protect the brand reputation of the department led to vast numbers of people dying.
The third point is that achieving improved standards will require a change of culture, as others have said. Above all, that will demand consistent, determined and visible leadership from the top. I want to use an example that we might reflect on. I very much welcome the way in which the new Cabinet Secretary—the head of the Civil Service and, in effect, the head of our public services—has chosen to publish her objectives. That is a fantastic step forward, but I have to note that they do not include a responsibility to promote and protect the highest standards of ethical conduct. I think they should. There is a danger that we will pass the Bill and things will carry on much as they are, which, frankly, is with complacency about ethical standards.
My last point is that if there are to be ethical codes, and if they are to be enforced, they need to be clear and accessible. The Bill does not preclude that, of course, but the fact that individual authorities will be able to publish their own version of a code could confuse rather than empower the public. That means that the guidance from the “appropriate national authority”—a strange term to use; I presume it means the Government—needs to be absolutely clear and in the form of a very strong common core template that public authorities will have to implement.
At the end of the day, if people lose trust in the integrity of public authorities and public officials, it represents a real threat to our constitutional democracy. That is why this Bill is so important, but it must be seen as the start, not the end, of rebuilding trust.
Baroness Levitt (Lab)
My Lords, no one in this country needs reminding of the terrible events which are summed up in that single word: Hillsborough. The pain of the deaths of 97 people remains raw in the communities affected, not least because this was no accident—these people were unlawfully killed. As though that were not bad enough, what followed was a national stain on our public services, which reverberates still and contributes to the suspicion that many of our citizens feel about the state itself—that it is not there to serve the many and, worse yet, that those who work for the state are often contemptuous of many of the ordinary people who just want to go around living their lives in peace and security—because what followed the deaths, terrible enough though those were, was a cover-up. Inquiry after inquiry has shown that the state subjected the families to lies and smears, all so that the people who were in charge would not be held responsible for the deaths.
Members of your Lordships’ House have repeatedly paid tribute to the families because they never gave up. In the end, what was revealed was something which goes far further than just affecting the families. It is about the kind of society we want to be. At the various inquiries and investigations, the police lied, falsified their notes and got away with it, at least in part because they were represented by phalanxes of lawyers paid for by the taxpayer, when the families—the ordinary people—could not get legal aid. It looked unfair because it was unfair. The reason we need a law to deal with this is that, regrettably, what happened after Hillsborough is not an isolated incident, as many others have said. Horizon, Grenfell, Windrush, grooming gangs, infected blood—the list goes on and on. Although successive Governments have wrung their hands, nothing much has happened—but no more, and I am proud that it was a Labour Government who finally did something about it.
I have a particular interest in the criminal law consequences of failures of the state. In my view, the Government are right to abolish the old common-law offence of misconduct in public office, which was too vague and too imprecise, and I welcome the creation of the four new offences. That said, I have some concerns about the drafting, which may make these offences less effective than they ought to be. To give just one example, I am concerned that these offences would not cover paramedics who attend 999 calls and other emergencies. They do not fall within the definition of “those acting for a public authority” as currently drafted. That is one example. I will not go through the others now, but perhaps my noble friend the Minister will meet me so I can tell him of my concerns and see whether we can work together to make this great Bill even better.
This new law will be about the recalibration of the relationship between the state and its citizens—the kind of society we want to be, where it is made explicit through our laws that the state is there to serve ordinary people, including those who are at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale. We believe that everyone counts or nobody counts, and that is why I am proud of the Government for making this happen.
Baroness Benjamin (LD)
My Lords, I too pay tribute to the fearless campaigning by the victims’ families and survivors of Hillsborough, whose resilience, strength and courage over 36 long years in the face of unaccountable power and unthinkable injustice made this Bill a reality. Bishop James Jones should also be praised for his commitment, determination and dedication to getting us to this landmark point.
The Bill is a welcome step on the road to improving openness and candour within public bodies, but it does not go far enough to protect victims of state injustice. The opportunity to strengthen the impact of the Bill should not be lost, so will the Minister confirm that the Government will ensure that the Bill has the strongest effect? Will he guarantee that a timetable will be set without delay to table secondary legislation extending the duty of candour in Clause 2, and that the extension will include public officials subject to serious complaints, sometimes affecting thousands of people?
With this in mind, I draw attention to the Windrush victims and survivors—the generation who came, as British citizens, 78 years ago from the Caribbean, answering the call from Britain, the motherland, to come and help rebuild the country after the war. Yet the Windrush generation had to face adversity, discrimination, violence, rejection, racism and abuse. They could not get places to live. They had to take low-paid jobs even though they were qualified to take on senior roles. But with determination, resilience, courage and a driving force, they showed that Caribbean people could survive and thrive despite all the obstacles, hurdles and challenges. Even though they faced unbelievable prejudice, they influenced the country with their style, music, talent, vibrancy and creativity, and I am proud to be part of that generation.
However, astonishingly and brutally, many of them found themselves part of the hostile environment policy developed by the last Government. It had a catastrophic impact on the Windrush generation, who had their British citizenship taken away from them. It was established that more than 15,000 victims suffered the loss of employment, pensions and homes. They were denied access to passports, health and social care, bank accounts, driving licences, and much, much more. Many were wrongly deported to countries they had not grown up in and were not even born in. Some were denied re-entry to the UK when they travelled abroad. They suffered significant and unbelievable trauma. Some have died because of the severe stress, and their descendants have continued to be severely impacted too.
Because of these experiences, survivors of the Home Office Windrush scandal have been calling for a public inquiry since 2018, when the scandal first came to public attention. However, successive Governments, including the current one, have dismissed and marginalised their calls for truth, accountability and repair. Victims have had to face the trauma of missing personal documents, destroyed records and misleading statements—all by public officials. The ineffective compensation scheme run by the Home Office continues to retraumatise survivors. A lack of legal support is leading to more than half the claims made by survivors being rejected.
A report in April 2026 by the National Audit Office found that by January 2026 only 3,148 claims had resulted in a payout. The survivors of the Home Office Windrush scandal are rightly calling for a public inquiry to shine a light on the compensation scheme, which is vastly inferior to other schemes set up following state wrongs, and to hold the public bodies responsible for this grievous harm to account. Windrush victims and survivors need a clear plan to be published, setting out how the duty of candour will be used to secure truth, accountability, justice and fair compensation for them. We need to know why innocent British citizens were allowed to lose their jobs, homes, healthcare, pensions, freedoms, dignity—and their lives. Windrush victims need to receive proper independent legal representation, just as victims of Hillsborough, Grenfell, the Post Office scandal and the infected blood scandal have fought to receive.
The department responsible for any scandal should not be allowed to investigate itself, judge its own wrongdoing and decide how much its victims deserve. People are still dying while waiting for justice. They do not need another listening exercise, another apology or another promise that things will improve one day. Trust needs to be restored. Victims need a voice and access to justice. By widening the duty of candour, this Bill can transfer some power away from the state, which caused the harm in the first place, and give some power to victims, who, as recent history has shown, have been repeatedly let down by the state.
Windrush victims and survivors deserve and need the truth to be released. They need those responsible to be held accountable so that nothing like this ever happens again. They need independent legal help and fair compensation while they are still alive to receive it. Surely these British citizens are entitled to that justice. So I ask the Minister: will the Government commit to an inquiry to show consideration and empathy for the Windrush victims and survivors? I noted that he did not mention them in his opening remarks. I look forward to what the Minister has to say.
Lord Roe of West Wickham (Lab)
My Lords, I thank noble Lords for the opportunity to speak on this matter. I start by paying tribute to the victims of multiple tragedies that stretch from Hillsborough to Grenfell, who have given this country the chance to raise its head and feel good about itself in a law that is being passed that speaks to accountability, confidence in our democracy and the fact that we can open ourselves up and learn from incomparable disaster. I start with that, as this is utterly a positive. It is a tragedy—like the tragedies that have led to it—that it has taken so long, and the courage of the people who have suffered the most has brought us here. But, now that we are here, we should celebrate the fact that the UK is doing this.
Regardless of the granular detail of the debate that will necessarily follow, or of the points that people who are more legally expert than me will make, the principle of this should not be underestimated. A country that is confident enough to do this is a country worth being proud of, and we should celebrate it in that context. If you look around the world, you see a distancing from this and a drawing away from this instinct. We should be pleased and proud, across all Benches, that it is coming here, even if we wish to debate the detail.
My whole working life, from the shop floor to leading an organisation, was spent responding to the tragedies we are talking about today. I do not intend to list them, but some of them are the most significant losses of life this country has seen in the public space, both when I was in the military and in many years in the fire service in the years that followed. My experience in those spaces—as a firefighter, as a soldier and then leading an organisation that had the public duty to respond to disaster—was that disasters are, as noble Lords might expect, terrible places. Things will go wrong. They are going to go wrong. In fact, I have never been at one, either in a leadership position or as an operational responder, where in the aftermath I did not think, “If only we’d done that”, “If only we’d done better”, “If only we’d had the foresight to do that”, “If only our radios had worked better”, “If only we hadn’t rendezvoused at that point”, “If only the cordon position wasn’t there” or, “If only we could have got another four people to the floor above”.
That tells me that this law is vital, particularly to the military, policing, the intelligence services and the emergency services. The noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, made a particularly good point about my colleagues in the healthcare profession, who are equally courageous and respond in spaces that are highly nuanced, with difficult decision-making. This law is particularly important to those organisations, and we must not shy away from it. You cannot be absolved from scrutiny, even if you lead an organisation of people who are genuinely heroic on a daily basis, as I did. In the London Fire Brigade, we were rescuing three people a day from genuinely life-threatening incidents where the firefighters responding could die. Multiple firefighters were injured every year, and colleagues were lost in that service. It was the same in the military. I am afraid that there is a great temptation within uniformed services—because of the heroic nature of what they do and the highly nuanced environment within which they take decisions—to seek absolution from this responsibility. It cannot be that way.
That is not to diminish either the courage or the fantastic leadership I have experienced in my two careers, but I am afraid that this can cloud judgment at a point of criticality when you are scrutinised. On the one hand, you have this great responsibility to those you lead, who you have watched, as I did at Grenfell, put themselves in unbelievable harm’s way. Simultaneously, on the other hand, the institution in its widest context—over many decisions, over many years and over multiple leaders—has let those very people down. How do you square those two things? How do you keep people motivated and coming to work to do horrible things that the vast majority of people in this House will never have had to do and would never want to do? The answer is that you shine a light on that.
What I want to say to noble Lords today is that this law is also for those in uniformed service—intelligence officers, special forces soldiers and armed police officers. At the time they face that scrutiny, people do not always feel it. Because the mechanisms to scrutinise bodies such as the organisation I run were not adequate, they did not feel they wanted it because it felt like an attack rather than normal business and what would be expected. I take the point about ethics—it is well made—but I believe you need sanction and guardrails to ensure that big institutions with their own power, their own histories, their own heroism, their own stories and their own version of the truth are duty-bound to stare into failure and acknowledge it.
I say this from personal experience. The single biggest education I had post-Grenfell was from those who had lost the most: the families. Those were the hardest meetings, and they still are. I met with a survivor recently here, and he said to me, before we knew that this Bill would pass, that he was so tired. He was sick of campaigning, and he was sick of not being listened to. I mean no disrespect by this, but he said, “I don’t want to be like Margaret Aspinall in 20 years’ time. I don’t want to give my life to doing something that the state should just do and that a responsible democracy would put in place. I don’t want to do it any more”. So it is with great relief that I see that this Bill will pass. It is absolutely morally the right thing to do.
I have two detailed points that I would like to come back to—I am sure we will. We have to strengthen the voice of those who suffer the most within the discharge of this Act. Whether it is by way of the IPA or another mechanism, we have to place them in the centre. As I said, the greatest education I had in the LFB was through bringing survivors and those who had lost their family members into a committee and a panel—along with those from, for example, the New Cross fire, who had suffered generationally before—and giving them agency within our decision-making. It was sometimes extremely uncomfortable. They did not always agree with us. I do not claim any moral superiority in this—we did it because we were made to, in a way—but doing so did us a great favour, and we need to see the same in this.
I apologise for slightly overrunning. On public inquiries, there has to be an oversight mechanism. There is no point in making recommendations if you are not then held to account. As a man who was held to account, rightly, by the Home Secretary at the time in a special ministerial board, I say that it works. I thank noble Lords for their attention, and I look forward to the passage of the Bill.
Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure and an honour, although rather difficult, to follow the noble Lord, who spoke movingly and from the heart about things he knows a great deal about. I thank him for what he has said. I apologise for having been less in the Chamber than I would have liked because of another Bill in Committee upstairs.
I look at this Bill from the point of view of the sub-postmasters, and I declare an interest as a member of the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board. It was good to hear the remarks of my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, who also sits on that board.
I have an initial question to the Minister from which everything else I say follows: does the Bill cover the Post Office, a so-called arm’s-length organisation? I believe that, because of the definition contained in paragraph 4 of Schedule 2 to the Bill, the Post Office is covered, but I should be grateful for the Minister’s explicit confirmation of that.
An important aspect of the Post Office scandal is that it began as a computer problem, both hardware and software, but rapidly turned into a human behaviour problem, as managers denied the existence of the computer problem. Perhaps they denied it first to themselves, but later, they certainly denied it to everyone else. Managers believed—or pretended to believe—what they were paid to believe, and therefore what they wanted to believe. We all tend to believe what we want to believe. But how does a duty of candour in practice apply in such circumstances?
It is human nature to defend oneself and the organisations of which we are a part and which pay our salaries, and only the most self-confident freely admit to their own faults. So, in one sense, the Bill tries to counteract human nature. It will work only if it sets up institutions and cultures which reward honesty and openness.
I am not convinced the Bill does reward openness. It attempts to punish deceitfulness, but that is a different thing. How do we reward the whistleblower? That is different from protecting the whistleblower. How does the Bill ensure that these problems are nipped in the bud before they ever get to the stage of public inquiries? Okay, it provides for internal policies and for discouraging retaliation against whistleblowers, and that is good. But if you have lived through the Post Office scandal, as the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, and I have, you know how insidious the accusation of disloyalty is. You know how a hint here or there—that you are being too loyal to your professional ethics and not loyal enough to your business—can influence behaviour. You know that career pathways depend on being seen as part of a team.
The Bill could do more, perhaps through the institution of an office for whistleblowers; perhaps through adopting some of the ideas, as the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, referred to, that Professor Hodges is putting forward about non-blame cultures; perhaps through the Independent Public Advocate. But it could do more to encourage good behaviour from the start.
How will the Bill actually work in practice? There are those directly employed by the Post Office. How will it extend to them? Paula Vennells told me that it was impossible for the Post Office or Fujitsu to access the sub-postmasters’ accounts remotely. We know now that that was wrong. But was it an intentional lie? We may never know, but personally, I believe that at the time she said it to me, she probably believed it. But later, she must have come to recognise that it was untrue. Would the Bill mean that she would be required to come back and put something right that she had realised was wrong? And since I was not myself an inquiry—I was an MP working for my constituent—would the Bill cover her talking to me?
We know that Susan Crichton, the Post Office’s general counsel, asked Fujitsu to “work their magic”—which meant remotely access the sub-postmasters’ accounts—but does her knowledge become imputed to the chief executive of the organisation of which she was a part? How does this Bill deal with wilful blindness in the face of the evidence?
How does the Bill cover the work of the investigators? They told each of the sub-postmasters that they were the only ones with the problem. They knew that this was a lie. It had the result that sub-postmasters, at their lowest ebb and facing false accusations that would lead some of them to take their own lives, were isolated from each other and deprived of the support that collectives like trade unions provide. It was one of the most shocking aspects of the scandal, among many, many shocking aspects. Would that be a breach of the Bill?
How, precisely, would the Bill extend to Fujitsu, that glorious company which has paid not a penny of compensation and which remains on the Government’s list of companies to do business with? How does it apply to the lawyers, upon whose advice we are told the Post Office CEO depended? How does it apply to the principal accounting officer, who delegated his responsibility to others?
I welcome the Bill, but I worry that it concentrates most on public inquiries and investigations—the period after something has gone so seriously wrong that the Government are dragged, kicking and screaming, to having a public inquiry. I believe that it needs to stop the bad behaviour before there is a need to punish it.
Lord Barber of Chittlehampton (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend the Minister on his speech this afternoon, and the many Members across the House who made moving and powerful contributions, including the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett, Lord Bichard and Lord Roe, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester.
A long time ago, I was born in the wonderful city of Liverpool. I have identified with the city and its football teams ever since, supporting Liverpool almost obsessively, but always having a sneaking regard for Everton, too. That, by the way, was before Andy Burnham became Prime Minister. I have also found myself involved from time to time with improving education in the city.
On 15 April 1989, the day of that terrible and tragic set of events at Hillsborough, I was the best man at a wedding. It was, incidentally, the wedding of my noble friend Lord Pitt-Watson. So, very unusually for me, I did not even think about football until the evening. I can remember the sense of shock and horror when I finally heard the news. I am humbled now, all these years later—far too many years later—to have the opportunity to speak in support of this important legislation and to publicly express my admiration for and sympathy with the Hillsborough families and all they have been through.
Today, I have only one point to make. It is to reinforce one the Minister made originally and that others have referred to: while sanctions and enforcement are absolutely essential, if this legislation is successful, as we all hope, those sanctions and enforcement will rarely have to be used, because our collective intention is surely to tip the balance of the culture irreversibly in favour of candour and integrity. The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, mentioned ethics, and the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, talked about the importance of acting ethically, as people have done and always should have done over the 60 years he has been in public service.
I believe that that is what will happen. The Bill will go with the grain of the best elements of public service. It will reinforce and strengthen the culture of integrity, to which many—but sadly not all—public servants have always been committed. It will surely, too, act as a deterrent to any who are not. As a result, I repeat, it will tip the balance in favour of candour and integrity. Paradoxically, therefore, the more successful the legislation is, and the deeper the culture becomes, the less enforcement will be necessary.
However, importantly, it will not happen as night follows day; it will have to be worked for day after day, week after week, year after year. Culture change does not happen by passing a piece of legislation. I urge public servants everywhere, especially those in leadership positions across the public service and those who make policy for the public services, to consistently and constantly build and reinforce a deep and abiding culture of candour and integrity: a culture in which people do the right thing, however difficult it might be, because it is the right thing.
Even more than this historic legislation, such a culture would be the finest possible tribute to the Hillsborough families and their long, courageous campaign. Once, at a cup final, I read a huge and striking banner among Liverpool fans that was perhaps more profound than most. It read, “What We Achieve in Life Echoes in Eternity”. Eternity is a big word: not even the House of Lords can legislate for that. But, eternity or not, the outcome of the long, courageous campaign of the Hillsborough families will, I believe, echo through the public services for a very long time, and hopefully for ever. I strongly support the Bill.
Lord Anderson of Ipswich (CB)
My Lords, I shall focus my remarks on a less frequented part of the Bill, Part 3, which repeals the common-law offence of misconduct in public office and replaces it by new statutory offences. It is almost six years since the Law Commission reported on this, after a detailed statutory consultation. The common-law offence is an ancient one, but fell largely into disuse during the 20th century. Attempts to use it again more recently have demonstrated its defects, notably a lack of clarity and precision. These defects created the potential for what the Law Commission described as misuse—for example, in prosecuting journalists—injustice, and a tendency to target junior rather than senior officials. The Law Commission recommended that the common-law offence be repealed and replaced by two statutory offences. It is to the Government's credit that this recommendation is given effect in the Bill. What remains for us, I suggest, is to ensure that the statutory offences have the clarity, the precision and the efficacy that the common law lacked.
With that in mind, I have three concerns in particular. First, the Clause 13 offence is committed only if a person uses their office
“to obtain a benefit … or to cause another person to suffer detriment”.
Any defence lawyer worth their salt will take this as an invitation to argue that the offence can be committed only if a benefit is actually obtained or a detriment actually suffered. That may, to be fair, not be the Government’s view. A Minister stated in Commons Bill Committee last December that the offence can be committed, as the Law Commission recommended, where public office is used with the intent to obtain a benefit or to cause detriment. That would correspond, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, indicated, with the position under the Bribery Act 2010, in Section 2. But laws need to be clear on the face of the statute book, particularly when they fall to be applied by juries. I hope Clause 13 will be amended to put this beyond doubt.
Secondly, the deliberately narrow defence recommended by the Law Commission to protect whistleblowers, which would require officeholders to prove that their conduct was in the public interest, has been translated in the Bill into a far broader defence of reasonable excuse. This would weaken the offence, opening the way for defendants who have behaved in a seriously improper way to seek to avoid penalisation by relying on such matters as short staffing or lack of training—matters which might be considered a reasonable excuse but which are obviously not in the public interest. The impact assessment makes the point that honest mistakes or finely balanced operational decisions should not be caught by this offence—indeed so—but the requirement of seriously improper behaviour ensures that they will not, whatever the scope of the statutory defence.
My third concern relates to the Law Commission’s recommendation that contractors who exercise functions or perform work on behalf of the Government should be covered by the definition of public officeholder. However, the definition of “works for” in Clause 25(3) is a narrow one. It encompasses a contract of employment, but not a contract to provide public functions. Schedule IV to the Bill is less clear and less extensive than it should be—the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, has given one example and promises more; I was delighted to hear it—and there is no explicit provision for corporate liability accompanied by consent and connivance liability for company officers, as again there is under the Bribery Act.
Finally, I make one further reflection. The terms of reference of the Ethics and Integrity Commission created in October 2025 task it with advising
“public authorities on the development of clear codes of conduct with effective oversight arrangements, in line with the planned forthcoming obligations of the Public Office (Accountability) Bill”.
Yet the source of such guidance is stated in Clause 11 of the Bill to be not the Ethics and Integrity Commission but the “appropriate national authority”. As the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, suggested, and as Clauses 11(4) and 24 confirm, this appears to mean the Government. So my question to the Minister is: have the Government had second thoughts about giving the Integrity and Ethics Commission a role in this Bill, and, if so, why?
More broadly, the independence and indeed the very existence of the commission are currently guaranteed by nothing more than whether the Government of the day desire them. A future Government could sweep it away without the need even for the assent of Parliament, dismissing as a quango a body whose whole purpose is to guard against the abuse of executive power.
The Committee on Standards in Public Life, under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Evans, made a powerful case in its 2021 report Upholding Standards in Public Life for placing constitutional watchdogs on a statutory footing to give them at least the protections of Parliament. I wonder whether that is something that should be envisaged for the Ethics and Integrity Commission—and I wonder whether this Bill might play its part in achieving that.
Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to begin the new term with support for this Bill. I begin with my tributes, first, of course, to the Hillsborough law campaigners—survivors, family members, lawyers, and supporters—a shining example to anyone who strives against grave injustice anywhere in the world. When this Bill passes, I hope soon, the achievement will be theirs, to the benefit of millions of others. I remember awarding them a Liberty human rights award at a star-studded ceremony 13 years ago. They were the real stars. Their struggle, as we have heard, began 24 years earlier in 1989, with the greatest sporting event disaster in our history and the long, corrupt cover-up that followed.
It is sad that even in the two years since the last general election, there have been concerted attempts to create blanket exemptions and prevent anything now recognisable as the Bill’s central duty of candour reaching the statute book—so thanks are due also to the new Prime Minister, a long-time supporter of the campaign in and out of Parliament and government. His return to Westminster will no doubt have focused minds and shifted roadblocks.
Thirdly, respect is due to my noble friend Lady Levitt, whose name graces the Section 19 statement of human rights compatibility on the face of the Bill. We shall miss her criminal legal expertise at the close of this debate, but it is so good to hear her participating with her characteristic distinction.
I suggest that the whole House should support this measure: progressives with our instinctive loathing of inequalities of arms and abuses of power; conservatives with their deeply held suspicions of the dangers of overweening and unaccountable state power in particular; and independents—but hopefully all of us—with an unshakable commitment to the rule of law. It is not insignificant that we will hear from the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hale of Richmond, today.
After Hillsborough, Windrush, infected blood, the Manchester Arena, Grenfell, the postmasters and countless other scandals where public bodies closed ranks at the expense of their victims and the public they were supposed to serve, it can no longer complacently be claimed that a statutory duty of candour is not necessary in our old, unbroken democracy. And to be clear—to be very clear—genuinely sensitive, as opposed to embarrassing, information will continue to be protected.
Public trust in vital institutions is in short supply. Having called for, served on and studied various probes over many years, even I have become sometimes cynical at the way that politicians respond to public outcry with long-grass inquiries, to which respondents may obfuscate and even lie with impunity, and where public bodies are represented by banks of expensive lawyers while victims and their families struggle to be heard on a shoestring. As we have heard, parity of representation is another vital pillar of the scheme. I hope that it is sufficiently robust in its formulation. By no means least is the requirement of codes of ethical conduct for public authorities to embed the duty of candour in culture as well as law.
If there are any remaining sceptics of this ground-breaking Bill, to them I say this. Of course law alone cannot remedy instincts rooted in collective vested interests in self-preservation. Still, law can help encourage and enforce better instincts that are, in the end, in the best long-term interests of vital public services and institutions. In the words of the great former US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis:
“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman”.
Scrutiny is of course needed, but surely the supportive scrutiny in this Bill is what those who have struggled for it for so long so richly deserve.
Lord Redwood (Con)
My Lords, I share the mood of this House about the tragedy of Hillsborough. I pay tribute all those who have spoken so movingly and with great sensitivity about the long suffering that it has caused. They have drawn, rightly, on their own experiences.
Surely the very least we can expect of all of us and of all public servants, elected and unelected, is that we should tell the truth to an inquiry. That should be a minimum requirement or expectation. Surely we should go further and expect all public officials facing an inquiry to collaborate willingly, to offer information and to share the relevant papers, rather than seeing it as a defensive measure they have to take to protect themselves and their small part of the public sector from proper scrutiny. They should want to get to the bottom of it to learn from the experience. How do you run a good organisation? You learn from your mistakes, as well as reinforcing your successes.
I want to concentrate, in my brief remarks, on how important a properly enforced and widely accepted and adopted duty of candour is throughout the public sector to avoid another series of chapters of disasters of the kinds we unfortunately have to review today—everything from bad blood to the Grenfell fire, the Hillsborough disaster and the Post Office mugging some of its best employees. If we could get the public sector to adopt that more widely we would start to intercept problems early and avoid them getting out of control, and we would succeed in stopping some problems ever emerging. There are many good public officials who already do that automatically and do not need to be told, but clearly there are not enough, because we have seen too many tragedies coming from too many different parts of the public sector.
I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, who led a small group of us MPs in the Commons some years ago. We were quite convinced that the sub-postmasters were being wronged and that Post Office senior management was doing bad things by not understanding that the fault was from a computer and not from the people. I remember asking a succession of Ministers at the time, “Is it likely that, suddenly, a lot of your best managers, who have been honest and running good businesses for many years, would all become crooks at the same time? Would they become such incompetent crooks that it would all show up in the accounts and the computer runs as soon as they took the money off the Post Office?” It was completely nonsensical, yet we were not able to get this simple point across to Ministers taking briefs from the Post Office and from senior executives who were working with lawyers, so they lived the lie and tried to persuade us of something that was patently absurd.
This is not just history; the Post Office tragedy goes on because many of the things are still not being fixed. There are still sub-postmasters whose reputations have not been rehabilitated properly or publicly enough, so I say to the Government: get on with it. There are still sub-postmasters who have not received their compensation. Successive Governments have failed. Again, the Government must get on with it. If we are to make any sense of this new spirit embodied in a Bill that has a very welcome aim then these things need fixing now.
Let us take the case of the British Steel workers in Scunthorpe. The Government recently nationalised British Steel. They have led the public and, I presume, the workers in Scunthorpe to believe that the main purpose is to save the jobs of those working at the blast furnaces there. Will that actually be the case? Do we have enough candour here? We also know that the Government think that blast furnaces should be replaced with electric arc furnaces and that there used to be plans to do that for Scunthorpe. We also know that, if that happened, there would be a very big loss of jobs because far fewer workers are needed in an electric arc furnace plant than in a blast furnace plant.
Let us have some candour from the Government. If they are genuinely going to preserve these jobs for many years then that would be very good news for the workforce, but can they guarantee that? Let us have some candour for the taxpayers. How much will that cost? Apparently, British Steel is losing £1.3 million a day. For how many more days and years can you go on losing that amount of money? Is there a plan—we still have not been told the plan—that would reduce those losses while preserving all those jobs? These are the kinds of things that a Government need to get right if they are to persuade people in favour of more nationalisation and that a doctrine of candour can actually work.
Let us take the railways. There have been a couple of unfortunate crashes over the summer. I presume that Network Rail and those involved looked quickly at what had gone wrong, because if something really bad had gone wrong that could repeat itself then they would have had to shut down other parts of the network, which they did not do. However, we did not have any candour at the time about why those people had been injured and why two people had died. Should we not have more candour about that? Now that the railway is becoming fully nationalised, why do not we get a debate into the issue of why you do not get a seat belt on an intercity or express train? The crash investigations usually reveal that most of the serious injuries and deaths are caused by people being flung out of their seats into hard surfaces and sharp surfaces, or thrown against windows. That is what causes the real damage to people.
I say this to the Government. I love the idea of candour and honesty; it is the only way to run things well. You need to be honest as soon as something starts to go wrong. You need to share it with people. You have to come to the House of Commons or the House of Lords and say, “This has gone wrong, but we know the fix, and this is what we’re going to do”. That is not happening in enough cases. The Government, who want more nationalisation, should particularly look to the nationalised industries. As someone who has thought and written a bit about them, I find that it is becoming fashionable again, but please get it right.
Lord Rooker (Lab)
My Lords, I make it crystal clear that I support the Bill. Indeed, I would support a tougher Bill to include better protection for whistleblowing, because prevention is better than cure. As has already been said, it is clear that, without a national oversight commission dealing with inquests and inquiries, it is likely that such reports will continue to gather dust.
I realise that we are going to be told these are issues for other Bills. I have heard that in the past many times. I have also learned that you need to act legislatively when you can. Even if you can get only 80% of what you need or want, take it then—because all the other plans and promises will be down the road by several years. We need these two things in particular to make a stronger Bill. We can get them put into the Bill.
While several scandals are referred to in the volumes of briefing on the Bill, it is absolutely clear that the damage done to Hillsborough families over the decades has created the pressure and momentum for the Bill. At Inquest’s family listening project in 2025, a participant said:
“It’s only when we had the Hillsborough Independent Panel did the families get full disclosure”.
Without disclosure,
“you don’t know what you’re up against”.
We will again fail these families if we do not build in sufficient resources. This was the final point in the speech made by the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller: we need the resources, because otherwise the extra work will be taken from front-line services.
In general, and I regret to say this, we have become a nation that scrimps along on the big issues. That is not how it used to be. We did not always scrimp along. That is what we are doing. To prevent this, we need to have a belief that those running front-line services, when they are asked to do something that cuts front-line services, will have the guts to speak up and say, “We are cutting front-line services to do what we need to do as a result of this Bill” and to use the Bill to tell us the truth. Otherwise, we will simply have a demission of power and cuts without us being told about it. People would get on and do the extra work that the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, said would be required, but they would not do other work. I have yet to hear the evidence that we will have sufficient support from the Government or the House for those people to take those actions.
Baroness Featherstone (LD)
My Lords, I very much welcome the Bill. The Hillsborough families had not only to endure an unimaginable loss but then to spend decades trying to establish the truth about what had happened. Sadly, public institutions so often respond to appalling situations by becoming defensive, protecting their reputations, rather than by being open about their own actions. The duty of candour and assistance is a very important change, and so too is the attempt to address the inequality between bereaved families and public authorities at inquests and inquiries.
However, there is an aspect of institutional failure, which I hope we can explore as the Bill progresses. The Bill quite properly deals with what institutions must do when something has gone badly wrong and an inquiry or investigation follows, but the history that has brought us to this Bill raises an earlier and important question: what on earth was happening inside those institutions while the wrongdoing was taking place?
Many of our major scandals demonstrate that the eventual revelation was not by any means the first occasion on which anybody knew that something might be wrong. There had been warnings, complaints or people within an organisation who had tried to raise concerns, who often found themselves on gardening leave or signing NDAs for a sum of money. The abuse by Jimmy Savile was not uncovered—not because nobody had ever had concerns about him; the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse repeatedly demonstrated that institutions had received information about the abuse long before they responded adequately.
On the Infected Blood Inquiry, I would like to put on record my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady May, although she is not in her place, for commissioning that inquiry after 35 or 40 years of people trying to get justice. I declare my own interest, because one of my sister’s twin boys had haemophilia and was infected with hepatitis C, and he died aged 35, leaving a 10 month-old baby daughter.
The blood inquiry exposed failures that had happened over many years, in which information existed but was not confronted. To this day, and despite an excellent inquiry, those who lied and covered up what happened have suffered no detriment. When I talk about this, and I have not said this publicly before, I believe that the state killed my nephew, because it was known in the Department of Health. It was known that there was a cover-up. They knew they were giving infected blood, so they murdered him—forgive me—not to mention the Church and paedophilia.
The cases are very different, but they reveal a recurring institutional problem: the desire of an organisation to protect its reputation. At that point, it becomes something more dangerous—a reason not to ask the questions that might produce damaging answers. Of course, reputation matters to public institutions, but there is an important distinction between earning public confidence by dealing honestly with failure and seeking to preserve public confidence by preventing failure becoming known. Once an organisation crosses that line, its incentives become distorted. A complaint may cease to be regarded as information that needs investigating and instead be regarded as a reputational problem that needs managing. The person raising a concern becomes someone who is seen as a problem and is treated as such.
The Bill recognises part of this. It requires public authorities to promote high standards of ethical conduct and to adopt codes dealing with candour, complaints and protected disclosures. I do not think that we have got the balance right between the responsibilities of the person who raises a concern and the responsibilities of those who receive it. We spend a great deal of time, quite properly, considering whistleblowers, but in many of these scandals somebody did speak up. Sometimes, many people spoke up. The failure was that the institution did not listen. That raises a very different question of accountability, because if somebody in a position of responsibility receives credible evidence of serious wrongdoing or a continuing risk to others, what responsibility do they have in the Bill to ensure that it is properly examined? It is not enough to provide a whistleblowing procedure if those receiving the warning can satisfy their responsibility by processing the complaint rather than confronting what it says.
I recognise that there are difficulties in translating that into law. Not every complaint should trigger a major investigation; allegations can be mistaken, malicious or impossible to substantiate; and those running public services must be able to exercise reasonable judgment. But where there is credible evidence of serious wrongdoing, systemic failure or a continuing risk of significant harm, should there not be a positive responsibility for those in positions of authority to ensure that it is properly investigated and acted on? I would be interested to hear from the Minister how far he believes the provisions in the Bill already achieve that. I do not think they do.
The Bill’s stated purpose is that public authorities should
“at all times act with candour, transparency and frankness”,
yet the specific enforcement duty of candour and assistance is principally tied only to inquiries and investigations. If we are serious about changing institutional behaviour, that principle has to operate at the point when the difficult decisions are being made, not at the later point when an inquiry asks why those decisions were made.
A critical question for me, as the Bill progresses, is whether it imposes sufficient responsibility and sufficient consequences on those at the top who receive credible warnings and fail to act. The duty of candour should help us establish the truth when something has gone wrong, but the greater achievement would be to ensure that uncomfortable truths are confronted early enough and that action is taken, so that disasters never happen in the first place.
Baroness Bousted (Lab)
My Lords, I am a panel member of the public inquiry into Orgreave, now a modern housing estate on the outskirts of Sheffield. In 1984, it was a major South Yorkshire coking plant. On 18 June 1984, Orgreave was the site of conflict between approximately 6,000 police officers from 28 different forces, led by the South Yorkshire police force, and approximately 5,000 striking miners, who were picketing Orgreave to stop coke being transported to British Steel blast furnaces. It was an extremely violent event. Miners and police officers were injured, some seriously. There were mounted police charges, including into the village of Orgreave itself. Short and long shields, truncheons and police dogs were used. The Orgreave inquiry was established to investigate what happened on that day, during which 95 miners were arrested and later charged with riot and unlawful assembly. The former, riot, at that time carried a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
The first batch of 15 cases on the charge of riot were tried the following year, starting on 8 May 1985. The trial collapsed after 40 days when the prosecution offered no further evidence. In 1991, South Yorkshire Police paid £425,000 in compensation to 39 miners in response to their claims for assault, wrongful arrest and malicious prosecution.
The Bill’s official title is the Public Office (Accountability) Bill. Its more common title is the Hillsborough law, in respect to the 97 football fans who were unlawfully killed on 15 April 1989 at a football match policed by South Yorkshire Police. Relatives of those who died on that dreadful day faced a delay of 23 years before the findings of the Hillsborough Independent Panel into the disaster were published in September 2012—published because they would not give up, because they would not be silent, because they were so brave and courageous.
Those involved in Orgreave on 18 June 1984 and campaigners led by the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, established in 2012, have had an even longer wait—42 years—for a public inquiry to be established. Clearly, it is a huge challenge to investigate an event which took place over four decades ago. That is why it is so essential that all the respondents to any inquiry ensure that they now, even before this legislation is passed, respect and fulfil their duty of candour. It is vital that they provide all the documentation that they have in their possession to the inquiry—that they hold back nothing of relevance and of interest, no matter that this might place their organisation in an unfavourable light. It is vital that they participate fully in the investigation. I echo the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, that all police records must be put under proper national control. In 2024, it was reported that Northumbria Police destroyed two boxes of evidence on events at Orgreave. The force said that this was in line with its data protection rules.
I strongly welcome the new offence of misleading the public contained in this legislation, and the new duty placed upon public bodies to embed candour at the heart of public services and to promote the ethical conduct of their employees based on the Nolan principles. The Orgreave Inquiry has published a list of issues to be investigated. These include the planning of and authorisation for tactics used, including mounted officers and mounted charges; the extent to which Her Majesty’s Government and government departments were involved in the planning for 18 June 1984; a detailed examination of the chronology of the conduct of the picketers and police officers on 18 June 1984; the arrest of and charging decisions for picketers and the process of making and authorising those decisions; and the accuracy, integrity and independence of police statements. The full list of issues to be investigated is available on the inquiry website.
In the light of the important questions posed by the inquiry, I take this opportunity to ask the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Lemos: what is the Government’s position on historic inquiries such as Orgreave? Namely, will a duty of candour be required of organisations which provide evidence of long past events which may reveal evidence which retrospectively places that organisation in a poor light?
Finally, there is a view that the Orgreave Inquiry should not be taking place, that the events of 40 years ago should be left in the past. I do not agree with this view. Two weeks ago, I was present at the Kent miners’ rally at the site of the Betteshanger colliery. There, in front of the inquiry stand, I met an elderly retired miner who was arrested and charged at Orgreave. Over 40 years later, he choked up as he began to recount the events of the day and could not continue. The trauma caused by the violence he experienced and witnessed is still there at the core of his being.
Lessons from the past must be learned if we are to avoid them in the future. This Bill will strengthen the powers of statutory and non-statutory inquiries, enabling them to do their job: to get to the heart of the matter. I welcome it, and I urge the House to support its passing.
Baroness Hale of Richmond (CB)
My Lords, at this stage in a debate it has almost all been said, but some things need to be said more than once, so forgive me. Nearly 37 years ago, 97 Liverpool fans were unlawfully killed at the Hillsborough football stadium in Sheffield. Fourteen years ago, the Hillsborough Independent Panel published its report. Thirteen years ago, the High Court quashed the original inquest verdicts of accidental death. Ten years ago, at the second inquest, the jury returned a determination of unlawful killing. Eight years ago, the then Home Secretary commissioned a report on how we could learn from the families’ experiences
“to ensure that the pain and suffering … is not repeated”.
Those are not my words but those of the author of that report, Bishop James Jones, to whom tribute has already been paid today. He presided over the independent panel and he titled his new report with the powerful words already quoted today: The Patronising Disposition of Unaccountable Power. The independent panel had listened to the families and analysed the documentary evidence in great detail. It had discovered three things which had not been revealed in previous inquiries: first, that the families had been treated with an astonishing lack of sympathy and compassion in the arrangements made and in their interactions with the police, seemingly bent on blaming the victims; secondly, that numerous police witness statements had been altered to tell the story that the police force wanted to tell; and, thirdly, that many of the victims might have survived had the response of the police and ambulance services been less chaotic.
Among the learnings from Bishop James’s report was the need for this Bill. We should not need it, but we do. One of the reasons for this is undoubtedly the patronising disposition that he referred to—that the families and the fans did not need to be taken seriously or even treated with basic humanity—but another reason is the extreme defensiveness which can be shown by public authorities when bad things happen. I am afraid that this is partly, at least, because of the fear of being held liable in the courts—the courts in which I served for so long. Yet, early recognition of the truth can often prevent the need for long, costly and heartbreaking legal proceedings, so we need to change the mindset—we need to change the culture. The duties of candour and assistance in the Bill have the potential positively to change the culture of state institutions by discouraging defensiveness and encouraging transparency from the outset, which should lead to earlier answers, earlier learning and earlier accountability.
This is not just about righting past wrongs; it is about learning lessons and preventing future harms. If investigations have access to the information they need, the truth can emerge more quickly. This is not only fairer for victims and families but important for the public sector in the future. It should also build confidence in state institutions—confidence which has been seriously eroded by a number of scandals, not only Hillsborough but many others which we all know about now but did not at the time, many mentioned today.
When institutions are open, honest and forthcoming, accountability is strengthened and trust is rebuilt. and none of those institutions should be wholly exempt from these duties. None of these institutions is immune from the patronising disposition of unaccountable power, so they should not be immune from the correctives in the Bill. Of course, there should be protection for information which is sensitive on national security grounds, for the safety of public officials, or otherwise privileged or immune from disclosure under existing law. and it is my understanding, along with that of the other place and others who have contributed to this debate, that the Bill achieves those objectives.
As a former member of the Law Commission, I also welcome Part 3 of the Bill, which broadly implements the commission’s recommendation, made as recently as 2020, to replace the common law offence of misconduct in public office. For someone whose first law reform proposal, on the abolition of blasphemy, was implemented only some 23 years later, this is remarkably quick and I welcome it.
I end by paying tribute to the Hillsborough Law Now campaigners, who have worked so hard to bring about this much-needed reform, and who have some very sensible suggestions for improvement, many of which have been referred to today. I hope that these will be taken seriously, but let us not make our efforts to achieve the very best become the enemy of achieving the very good.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford (Lab)
My Lords, it is an honour to follow the distinguished noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hale. I too am conscious, as she said, that most things have probably already been said. None the less, this is such important legislation that it is crucial that those who want to do so participate in it, and that is why I continue to make my contribution. I want to start, too, by paying tribute to the families, because without them—without only them—we would not be having this debate today.
The disaster that occurred at Hillsborough was not a natural disaster or an accident. It was caused by the failure of police officers at every level to do their job and ensure that the fans were safe. That failure, as we have heard, was compounded in the subsequent decades by deliberate, repeated lying and cover-up by the police, by the abject failure of the judiciary, courts and lawyers to uncover the truth, and by the terrible complicity of parts of the media, with one newspaper in particular fabricating stories to vilify the fans and sustain the lie that they themselves were to blame.
I can recall immediately what I was doing on 15 April 1989 when the radio broadcast a newsflash that a major incident was unfolding at the stadium. My husband’s two younger brothers were among the Liverpool fans at that game, and like many other families we were desperate for news and watched on television the chaotic and heart-rending scenes as fans themselves rushed on to the pitch with make-do stretchers—but with no sign for a long time of any police officers or emergency workers. And so began that day what was to be decades of fighting for justice to clear the names of the fans and to make accountable those who were truly responsible.
The response of state institutions and organisations to the Hillsborough disaster has been an absolute scandal. Having finally got the truth, not through the courts but through Bishop James Jones and the Hillsborough Independent Panel, we may have expected that lessons would be learned; but instead, as we have also heard today, we have since had the Horizon scandal, Grenfell, grooming gangs, infected blood and other further evidence of institutionalised corruption, cover-up and failure to expose injustice and protect victims.
Almost 30 years after Hillsborough, I had personal experience of this culture. In 2017, the then Mayor of Greater Manchester, now the Prime Minister, established two local independent inquiries. The first was into the response of the emergency services on the night of the Manchester Arena bomb and was led by our departed colleague Lord Kerslake. The other was into the BBC allegations that police and local authorities had failed to investigate and protect the young victims of child sexual exploitation. As the then Deputy Mayor for Greater Manchester for Police, Crime and Fire, I chaired the steering groups for both those inquiries and both were severely hampered by the intransigence of every public service—the police, fire and rescue, local authorities.
Sir Bob came to see me on many occasions to try to unlock the resistance to providing information. Until we had a new chief constable some years later, when the culture did begin to change, the process was tortuous, protracted and strangled by legal machinations. Even some elected councillors were more concerned with reputational damage to their councils than exposing injustice on behalf of the victims who were of course their electorate. There is a common thread here: that organisational reputation has counted for more than truth, accountability, transparency and justice for victims and the public. Therefore, it is very important that the measures in this Bill apply equally to all inquiries, including those instigated locally, and to elected representatives where they have a public responsibility.
It is something of an indictment, and colleagues have said as much today, that this Bill is necessary, but necessary it undoubtedly is, and I fully support all the measures. But we have to ask ourselves how it is that public officials could lie, that the judiciary could be so incurious, and that newspapers can fabricate stories. The answer, of course, as we have heard today, and I agree, lies in the culture. So, while this Bill is necessary, it is not of itself sufficient unless it drives fundamental change in the culture of the state, its organisations and the people who work in it. It must change not only behaviour but mindset. It must inculcate a culture in which our public officials, our organisations and their leaders actually feel themselves that their first and foremost responsibility is to the public, to service users, to victims and to families.
There is much to commend in the Bill. As we have heard today, there are issues to be resolved and there are also some areas for improvement. I support the calls we have already heard for command responsibility—for the head of an organisation to be personally responsible for compliance—for better protection for whistleblowers, and for strengthening the powers and resources of the Independent Public Advocate. The noble Baroness, Lady May, explained how that may be of greater assistance to many members of the public than a formal inquiry. Finally, there is the issue of removing the requirement to prove harm from the offence of misleading the public.
There are also wide-ranging implications for the recruitment of senior leaders—who we recruit and how we recruit them—and for training throughout the public sector. By placing transparency at the heart of public accountability and reinforcing the expectation of proactive disclosure rather than reputational management, the Bill has the potential, at least, to transform the relationship between the state and the citizen and begin to rebuild public trust in our public services.
Lord Bellamy (Con)
My Lords, I too warmly welcome the Bill and pay tribute to all those who fought so hard to achieve it. If I may immediately pick up the point just made so forcefully by the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford: how are we going to make the change envisaged by the Bill effective? It is undoubtedly necessary, but not yet in itself sufficient. Although this is indeed a milestone, we are not yet at the destination that everybody wishes to see of deep cultural change. How are we going to get there? I would like to confine myself to just two aspects of this challenge: one is public inquiries and the other is how to make the duty of candour effective.
Astonishingly, we have no fewer than 26 public inquiries currently going on in this country. But as the Institute for Government report of December 2025 pointed out, that system of public inquiries is itself suffering from “systemic problems”, including cost, delay and failure to deliver change. As your Lordships’ own Statutory Inquiries Committee reported in 2024, in particular there is a failure to follow up on public inquiry recommendations, and that means that avoidable mistakes are constantly repeated. Therefore, I agree with the Institute for Government, which suggests that this Bill is a first step in the reform of our public inquiry system. There should be a clear system of consistently following up on inquiry recommendations, including by a committee of both Houses—or, failing that, a committee of this House—so that everyone is clear what steps are being taken to avert future tragedy. In particular, if recommendations are not implemented, why not?
I turn to the second aspect: how do we make the duty of candour effective? It is all very well to pass a Bill and to threaten a criminal prosecution, but how are we actually going to change the culture? In the debate in the other House, the right honourable Sir Jeremy Hunt lamented that he himself introduced into the NHS a duty of candour more than 10 years ago. He pointed out that that change in itself has had very little effect: we have still seen a series of national health scandals, with the Nottingham maternity scandal being only one of a number of examples. Similarly, there is already a statutory duty of candour on the police, but incidents such as the recent Maccabi incident in Birmingham do not suggest that that duty of candour is yet particularly effective. As the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, pointed out, just having codes is not enough; we already have plenty of codes. What are we going to do about this?
I suggest that changing the culture will be a matter of leadership, as many of your Lordships have pointed out, but it will not be easy, in particular—as the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, reminded us—as we are dealing with the complexities of human nature. Loyalty to one’s institution, hope, fear of losing one’s job, and the inability to accept that one is oneself at fault are all factors that play into the problem we are addressing.
I have no immediate answer, just one or two questions. Should we build into the system not only the threat of a criminal prosecution but some better reward and recognition that integrity, truthfulness and honesty are very much the right thing to do, so people start to think that they will get the pat on the back, as it were, and public approbation? As well as a duty of candour, a duty of praise, if you like, is the other side of the coin. Does our own system discourage candour? Has our culture of blame gone too far? Is our system too adversarial? Are we trying to pillory people when we should be trying to learn lessons for the future? All these are very important questions.
I fear that a criminal prosecution, or some criminal prosecutions, may indeed be necessary in order to make the point. Just passing the Bill, in itself, while very necessary, will not quite get us there; a great deal of thought needs to go into how we manage the psychology of this situation. I suggest that, to ensure that the Bill actually brings about change, and to monitor progress, a committee of this House should undertake post-legislative scrutiny not more than three years after Royal Assent, so that we get a good view of what is going on and we continue to chase and pursue the very important change that is necessary. This is a very good Bill, but whether it turns out to be a great Bill depends on the follow-through in which the Government and Parliament, and in particular this House, have a crucial role to play.
Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)
I support the Bill and the purposes behind it. We know that it is a priority for the Labour Government, in particular for my right honourable friend the Prime Minister. More importantly, it is important to the families who have lost loved ones at disasters, not least at Hillsborough. I of course endorse the tributes paid to the campaigners who have led to us being here debating the Bill today.
My concern is with the Bill’s reach, and specifically whether it will reach the financial regulators. Make no mistake: when financial services go wrong, it causes real harm—pain and suffering, in the words of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hale. It destroys lives, and there are examples of people who have lost their lives because of the harm that has been caused to them in the area of finance.
I have two problems on which I would like more clarity from my noble friend the Minister. First, there is a need to be clear about what counts as a public authority for the purposes of the Bill. The definition in Schedule 2 turns, in the end, on whether a body has functions of a public nature. From my perspective, to take one, the Financial Conduct Authority plainly exercises such functions. It is also, in form, a company limited by guarantee, as are the Financial Ombudsman Service and the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. I would like the Minister to confirm in the debate that these bodies will be included within scope of the Bill as it is worded at present; if they do not, we will need to return to the issue in Committee. It may well be that some functions of these bodies are within scope and others are not, but we need to be clear.
The definition of what counts as a public authority is the lesser of the two concerns. The larger one relates to Schedule 1. The duty of candour and assistance does not operate at large. It relates to the inquiries and investigations set out in Schedule 1—inquiries under the Inquiries Act, inquests and so on—which does not include my areas of concern. But there is the power in the section to include such further investigations as may be specified in regulations.
Regulation failure in financial services is almost never examined in any of the ways that have been specified in Schedule 2. The harm is financial rather than physical, so it produces no inquest, and, in truth, successive Governments have declined to establish statutory inquiries where they are plainly needed. But what we do have in financial services might be, for example, an independent investigation directed by the Treasury under Section 77 of the Financial Services Act 2012—which was the route used to initiate the London Capital & Finance inquiry and the inquiry into Connaught—or the report from the complaints commissioner under Part 6 of the same Act, or an inquiry by the Treasury Committee. These do not appear in Schedule 1, so the Bill’s central duty would not apply to the mechanisms by which financial regulators are in practice examined unless it is going to be specified in regulations. How and when will these regulations be made, and what consultation will there be on what is covered in them?
The thing is that it would not be important if the record were reassuring. Regrettably, there are well-founded concerns about delay, the completeness of the material provided and the difficulty of establishing who had been responsible for what when we come across financial malfeasance. Those are exactly the failings that the Bill is intended to address. Investors who have lost money through a whole series of scandals—Connaught, Blackmore Bond, Woodford, and those who were advised to transfer out of the British Steel pension scheme—will recognise the description of what the Bill is intended to address.
I am not asking for the financial regulators to be singled out; I am asking for them to be treated in the same way as any other body exercising this sort of statutory inquiry. Two things would resolve my concerns: first, a clear answer on the definition; and secondly, an undertaking that the power to include additional bases for initiating investigation will be used to specify problems that have arisen in financial services. I suspect that we will need to return to this issue in Committee, but I look forward to my noble friend the Minister’s response.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
I have rewritten chunks of my speech because other people have said what I was going to say and have said it better. I support the Bill and hope that the Government will listen to some of the amendments that will be tabled, because it can be improved. It seems that noble Lords from all around the House agree that it is a stain on the country when families who have suffered so much should then have to fight the state for the truth and for understanding that it did wrong.
Public institutions should tell the truth, even, or particularly, when the truth is uncomfortable. Hillsborough should have changed this culture, but again and again what we are seeing is the same instinct—the same culture—to protect the institution rather than the people it has failed. All tribute to the Hillsborough Law Now campaign for the fact that it pushed so hard and made us listen. In fact, many of us have been calling this the “Hillsborough Bill” from the start.
Of course, this goes much wider than Hillsborough. We have heard of the incredible losses that people experienced, but there is the Post Office scandal, the infected blood scandal, the Grenfell scandal and the Manchester Arena scandal—scandal after scandal where institutions cared more about protecting their reputation than they did about helping the people who have been impacted.
The Bill will be an important step in changing that culture, but only if it is tough and only if we understand that you do not change a culture just with words. A lot of processes have to really work inside it. For example, making something a criminal offence will not change that culture on its own. I welcome Clause 10 and its duty on public authorities to promote and maintain ethical conduct, but that needs to mean more than just another policy document. It needs leadership and proper monitoring, alongside practical codes of practice. The question should not simply be, “Has the law been complied with?” It should be, “Has the culture changed?”
The Bill rightly creates consequences when a public authority fails to meet its duty of candour, including the possibility of financial penalties. But if a public authority is fined, it is the taxpayer who pays. How on earth is that a deterrent? We really have to rethink these things.
We need to be clear about who is accountable when there is serious institutional failure. I am not suggesting that every institutional failure is the personal responsibility of a chief executive, but where those at the top are responsible, there needs to be a clear line of accountability. Obviously, this would apply to water companies as much as any other sort of organisation. Codes of practice mean that people can speak and can be judged on what they say.
I emphasise the role of whistleblowing. I have had an experience with a whistleblower myself, and if I have time at the end I might talk about my little brush with a public institution that lied to me and distorted things. It shows that almost every public institution will hide its wrongdoing if it possibly can.
Of course, all this raises the wider question: what about politicians? How are we going to pass a law that does not include ourselves? Why is it that everybody else has to tell the truth but not elected politicians and Peers? That is very wrong. It is wrong to pass a Bill that does not include us. I am not questioning parliamentary privilege—I accept that we can protect political debate—but we have to draw a line around deliberate deception. If we are prepared to demand candour from public servants, surely we should be prepared to ask it of ourselves.
Do we have the legal capacity to deliver the Bill? The Government anticipate an increase in legally aided inquest cases from a few hundred to potentially over 11,000 per year. I hope this will be off-set by the fact that the duty of candour will mean swift justice as opposed to long, drawn-out cases. That would be a really positive result.
University life ought to be covered in the Bill as well. I am not sure which bits are covered and which are not. How will the duties of candour and ethical conduct work in practice in higher education? What happens after an inquiry or inquest? What is the point of establishing the truth if nobody is responsible for making sure that changes happen?
My experience of being lied to by a public institution was being lied to by the Met. Back in 2012, somebody in my team at the London Assembly suggested that I ask for my record with the police. Other people had been doing it. The police very kindly sent me a report. They had me on their domestic extremist database, which obviously, for a rabid Green like me, was useful notoriety. I really did not mind at all. There were only 17 entries on this report and every single one was something that I had boasted about, either in newsletters or on social media—speaking to a rally in Trafalgar Square, going on a bike ride with some protesters and that sort of thing. I laughed at this. I thought it was so trivial: why on earth had they spent all those years trying to compile a report on me when I was telling them what I was doing anyway?
Later, however, a whistleblower came forward and told me that in the same month after I had asked for my report, he saw three officers engaged in physically destroying a number of police records by shredding. He believed that all those records were related to me. There were in excess of 30 reports. One of those officers then began to electronically delete a number of police records from a police database. Again, the whistleblower thought those records were about me. He had an absolutely miserable time afterwards in the Met and finally left. He said that he did not become a police officer
“to monitor politicians or political parties, nor to pay casual disregard to policy and procedure”.
Whistleblowers are people who we have to protect very seriously. We have to make sure that they are not driven out of their jobs by people who do not want to be reported on.
I very much support the Bill. I hope that we can amend it and make it much better.
Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)
My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness’s enlivening contributions to our debates. May she go on boasting.
Rightly, the Bill aims to ensure that the public service treats the public it serves with accountable candour and transparency. It is odd to feel that we need a Bill to achieve that end—it is something that should happen naturally between the public service and the public it serves—but, of course, we do, and we have had a number of Bills over the years that have dealt with public service conduct. I will mention another in a minute.
The fact that it has taken 37 years to reach this necessary point is, as the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, reflected, a severe and lasting lesson for all of us who have taken any part in the public service. Again, it should not have to happen that way.
What worries me about the Bill is not that we will, I hope, enact it—I am very much in favour of the principle of the Bill—but that we have done similar things before, not always with the success that we expected. We need to try to ensure that what emerges from the Bill delivers success for its aims. There is no room for complacency in our support for the Bill.
I suggest that noble Lords, if they have not yet taken the time, read—just before they go to bed because it will be good bedtime reading—the very Long Title of the Bill. It illustrates in a few intense lines what we are trying to deal with here; it is not going to be an easy task.
I commend, as others have done, the extraordinary efforts of the Hillsborough families, their legal representatives, the Horizon campaign and all those other campaigns that have been mentioned, in at last bringing a Bill of this kind to the House.
The previous legislation I want to refer to is as follows. When I joined another place as a new MP in 1983, my baptism of fire was being put on the Standing Committee for what was then the Police and Criminal Evidence Bill—PACE 1984. This made enormous changes, particularly from the point of view of someone like me, who had been practising at the criminal Bar for the previous 13 or 14 years, in the way in which the police behaved in investigations.
This had an ongoing effect on trials, where the conduct of those trials was much more normal in the way that it approached human behaviour. Judges were able not to conjure up directions to juries suggesting that police officers could remember all the content of a three-hour interview of which they had made notes the following day. Some of us here have been through that process. The answer was always, “We are trained to do that so we can remember three hours of interview”. So PACE made an enormous change in the way in which criminal cases were conducted, but it did not work in its entirety.
One of the things that did work was the creation of codes of conduct, and Code C to PACE is an epic example of the way in which the approach to litigation—in that case, criminal litigation—can be improved by demanding that the public service follows codes of conduct. I welcome suggestions that have been made in this debate that there should be some codes of conduct which are envisaged by the legislation. Who drafts them may well be a matter for debate, which has already been raised. But even despite PACE, we had Hillsborough.
A case in which I happened to be involved in the later stages was that of the Cardiff Three, in which three men were convicted of a murder they had absolutely nothing to do with. My involvement in the case was representing a young female prostitute who had been one of the false witnesses and was later prosecuted for her perjury. She had the good sense to plead guilty, and it was possible to show that she should have a short sentence because of the outrageous behaviour of the police, who had virtually locked her up in a flat behind a police station in south Wales. The police were prosecuted, but they managed to get away with it. They concealed documents that were relevant to the trial until it was too late to produce them because the judge had stopped the trial.
That is one example of egregious behaviour by a public service despite there being legislation that is supposed to prevent it. The Horizon case, so eloquently spoken of by my old friend, the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, is another example. I prosecuted postmasters in some Horizon cases. I was quite an experienced barrister by then. I was not told by anybody that there could be an iota of doubt about the computer material, which we as prosecutors were told provided cast-iron evidence against the defendants. We have to bear in mind that we can make mistakes even after legislation of that kind.
There are two short points that I want to mention. The first concerns national security. I am one of two former Independent Reviewers of Terrorism Legislation who have spoken in this debate. I believe that what is provided in the Bill is adequate. It produces a solution to a very difficult equation—nobody should underestimate the difficulty—between national security, which, as my noble friend next to me told the House, is a very delicate thing, and the honesty of the public service. It is very important that we enact that part of the Bill.
The second point is about inquests. I appeared recently at an inquest in south Wales concerning a death that resulted from misbehaviour in the local mental health service. The internal inquiry was a disgrace. There were concealments of documents. People did not come forward to say what had happened. There had to be an inquest. It was conducted by an excellent deputy coroner. We must ensure that such inquests continue in large numbers, and that the advocates who appear at those inquests are properly remunerated for the work they do so that there is equality of arms in those cases.
The Independent Public Advocate, who is a brilliant person, cannot do it on her own. She will have to instruct lawyers to appear. She cannot go to every inquest. We must make sure that those inquests are properly and fairly conducted in accordance with the spirit of this legislation.
Lord Sahota (Lab)
My Lords, it is a real honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Carlile. What I want to say has mostly been said but, still, I shall continue. I support the Bill because it addresses one of the most important principles in public life: when a state is responsible for serving the public, it must also be accountable to the public.
The lessons of Hillsborough are painful and profound. When things went wrong, institutions closed rank, information was withheld, responsibility was deflected, and bereaved families were left fighting for the truth. That is why I particularly welcome the Bill’s duty of candour. Public authorities and public officials should have nowhere to hide. They should be required to act with transparency, frankness and honesty, and to assist inquiries and investigations in finding the truth.
The Bill provides criminal sanction for serious breaches, which I wholeheartedly support as well. This matters because accountability cannot simply mean blaming an institution after the event. There must be a responsibility for the individual who makes decisions or who withholds information.
In my public life over the last 30 years, I have seen some incompetent people in charge of important decision-making where their first instinct is to protect themselves, hiding behind institutions and their departments. Most say that they are acting in the best public interest. I welcome that the Bill also challenges that culture.
Of course, we must be careful when forming criminal law. The threshold must be high and nobody should face imprisonment merely for making an honest mistake. However, when there is serious wrongdoing, dishonesty or deliberate failure to uphold fundamental responsibilities, there must be consequences.
I also strongly welcome the principle of parity of representation. This is about fairness. A bereaved family should not have to face a public authority equipped with lawyers and resources while the family struggles to obtain equivalent representation. The ordinary citizen, the little man or woman, must have a genuine opportunity to challenge the machinery of the state.
The Post Office Horizon scandal demonstrated why the Bill is so urgently needed. Thousands of postmasters were wrongly accused of stealing money from the Post Office, while serious problems with the computer system were known about. Yet those postmasters were left to carry the blame.
Windrush is another example. The independent review found that this was not simply bureaucratic bad luck but a profound institutional failure. The hostile environment in which this policy developed had devastating consequences for hundreds of law-abiding citizens—British citizens—many of whom had lived here since childhood. Some lost their job and their livelihood, and, in some cases, were wrongly removed from this country. What happened to them was reprehensible. I wish there had been such a law then to ensure that those responsible, including the Home Office of the day, could properly be held to account.
Then there was the Covid-19 pandemic and the controversy surrounding public procurement, including the so-called VIP lane. Billions of pounds of public money were committed in extraordinary circumstances, and serious questions have subsequently been raised about value for money, transparency and accountability. I hope this Government will pursue every opportunity to recover public money where it was improperly spent.
I hope the Bill will ensure that the power of the state is matched by an equal obligation to be accountable to the people it serves, rather than leaving families begging for information and truth. For those reasons, I strongly support the Bill and look forward to helping strengthen it as it proceeds through this House.
Lord Rennard (LD)
My Lords, the Bill is about more than Hillsborough, but we would not be here today but for the unlawful killings at Hillsborough 37 years ago. It must be enacted without further unnecessary delay, but still with significant scrutiny to help make sure that it achieves its aims.
As I said in our Hillsborough debate last November, it is welcome that the legislation will apply beyond public bodies to private bodies and contractors delivering public functions, but I fear that this principle will be undermined if subcontractors are not also included; nor will it be as effective as it should be if we fail to strengthen the whistleblowing protections so that breaches of the duty of candour cannot be buried. This may require the creation of an independent office of the whistleblower and other measures to ensure statutory protection for those who exercise candour and expose wrongdoing, perhaps among colleagues.
I speak as someone from Liverpool who is mindful of how the deaths of the blameless victims and the lies about them affected my city. It took great courage and determination in the face of establishment cover-ups to finally get the truth to be accepted beyond Merseyside and to bring about this Bill, but it should never have required a change in the law to make police and public officials tell the truth. A change of culture is necessary as well as changes in the law.
My fear now is that the Bill’s promise of accountability may be weakened by fragmented codes and inconsistent enforcement. We will achieve much through establishing the duty of candour, the provision supporting participation in inquiries and investigations and the proposed offences. The Bill requires public authorities to promote ethical conduct, and it permits authority-level codes and disciplinary consequences for employees, but there are therefore risks of ineffectiveness if there are different codes with different wordings and different complaint routes. A citizen’s entitlement to honesty, accurate records, a prompt response and correction of errors should not depend upon which authority is involved, which professional regulator happens to have jurisdiction, or whether the people responsible remain in employment when the issues are finally examined.
The criminal provisions properly require criminal proof, but a criminal investigation cannot be the routine response to every serious ethical failure. There needs to be proper investigation of conduct that is too serious for a merely internal response, but which would not properly be addressed by criminal prosecution. That is why the proposal made by Andrew Devine’s family deserves close attention. Andrew survived for more than 32 years with the catastrophic injuries he suffered at Hillsborough, and he was ultimately recognised as the 97th person unlawfully killed. His family’s experiences extended across decades of interaction with public bodies, healthcare regulators and the legal system. The family have therefore asked for there to be one enforceable code of conduct for all public officials, with significant sanctions, including financial penalties, for non-compliance.
The Bill could include a core statutory code so that no public body should be able to fall below a common minimum standard. The core duties should include honesty, candour, proper record keeping, timely disclosure, correction of known error, co-operation with lawful scrutiny, reasons for material decisions and fair treatment of affected people.
An effective system also requires independent enforcement. An authority implicated in institutional failure should not always remain the sole investigator and judge of its own compliance. A proportionate commission, accountable to Parliament, could triage complaints and refer suitable cases to existing regulators or employers. It could independently determine serious, repeated or systematic breaches. Its purpose would not be to punish every mistake: advice, correction, apology, training or warning may be sufficient in many cases. Public censure, a financial penalty or time-limited disqualification should be reserved for serious or persistent misconduct and imposed only through fair procedure.
Accountability should not disappear merely because a person resigns, retires or transfers before a matter is concluded. We should therefore ensure that the Bill creates not simply a series of codes but one intelligible baseline, with credible consequences for breaching it, and a fair, independent system capable of changing conduct before more families of victims have to spend decades fighting to establish the truth.
Lord Hayward (Con)
My Lords, the speech I am going to give this evening is one I wish I did not have to and did not feel obliged to. I am going to deal with elements of the Bill and the debate which relate to what the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, raised originally but have been covered by many other noble Lords in different parts of the House, including the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, and the question of whistleblowing. It is how you establish the process of candour at a lower level within any part of public service, because the reality is that this Bill should never have been necessary in the first place.
The two cases I will cite are examples of how, at a much lower level, things go wrong but people believe they can cover things up. I am in the fortunate position in the first example of being able to say that I have followed the processes in both cases. In the first case, the noble Lord, Lord Lemos, was present when I was with officials only a few months ago saying, “Will you please answer the questions which I have been raising for four years?” Four years ago, I introduced the Ballot Secrecy Bill and the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, advised me that I should seek counsel’s opinion through the Electoral Commission, which they and I did.
Counsel’s opinion was provided in August 2022. I have a copy of it here. Only one other organisation was provided with a copy: the officials handling the Ballot Secrecy Bill. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, touched on the matter earlier in relation to advice to Ministers. A whistleblower provided me with a copy of the advice given to Ministers on 29 September 2022, a month after counsel’s opinion had been provided to the Electoral Commission, me and the officials in the department. What did the advice from the officials say to the Minister? It said:
“The Electoral Commission have obtained Counsel’s advice to seek to bring clarity on this issue”—
whether legislation was necessary or not—
“and have shared it with Lord Hayward”.
They conveniently omitted the fact that they had had the advice, which I have established. I asked to meet officials over and over again. I asked questions in statutory instrument debates. I never got a reply.
The advice goes on to say:
“We have been given some headline information”.
They had not been given “some headline information”; they had been given a full copy of counsel’s opinion.
Only a few weeks ago, as I indicated, I made another effort, and during the recess, I communicated with the current Minister’s officials to say that I was going to raise this. That is precisely what we are facing here and what, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy, and others have identified, we should not have to be dealing with. It is the belief that people at a lower level will give up in the end. I have been looking round the Chamber and thinking, “How many of us as Members of Parliament dealt with cases when we did not believe the officials that we were dealing with, but there was just no way of finding a solution?”
In this case, what I find interesting about this ministerial advice is that there is no name at the bottom. There are loads of names of those on the write-round who will receive it, but there is no signature. I recommend that all advice to Ministers should be signed off by one official, because that would make that person responsible for the duty of candour.
The other example, sadly, is even closer to home, or “It couldn’t happen here”. A number of noble Lords will remember that I pursued over a long period the cost of traffic marshals, which involved millions of pounds. I notice one noble Baroness nodding, because she sat through my evidence to the Finance Committee: I will come back to that in a minute. I was seeking to establish how much money we were wasting on the traffic marshals, who are not legally required. As I explained to the Finance Committee, I was director of safety in a major industrial establishment employing 3,500 people and knew what the legal responsibilities were. On 6 December 2023, having asked for the cost of traffic marshals, the figure was given to me in an email from officials in this building: a traffic marshal would cost £65,613.50.
I told the officials, out of courtesy, that I was putting down a Question and would be drawing the answer, which I expected to be that, to the attention of the press. A few days later, I went to a meeting with officials and was told, “Oh, no, it’s not possible to calculate it”. I said, “Well, how was it possible to send me an email giving me a sum?” I was told, “Oh, no, it’s not possible”. I said, “Well, have I misphrased the Written Question?” I was told, “Oh, no, it’s not possible”. As far as I was concerned, that was a clear attempt to hide embarrassing data from the public eye because we were costing the nation millions. I was told it was not possible, but I waited. Fifteen months later, in a paper given to the Finance Committee, the cost of each individual marshal was identified. We have to ask ourselves: even within our own organisations, do we actually demand a duty of candour adequately?
Lord Bach (Lab)
My Lords, I should declare an interest, I think. I am the unremunerated non-executive chair of the trustees of the Leicester law centre. That is perhaps relevant to something I will say in a moment. Like everyone else I have listened to, I warmly welcome the Bill and would like to see it in force as soon as possible. My main regret is that it has just taken so long to legislate changes that should have been law years and years ago.
The yawning gap between the parties at inquiries and inquests has been obvious for a long time to anyone who wanted to notice. That these changes are at last to become embedded in statute is—I know I am repeating what many have said—due to the strength, patience and courage of all those who have fought so long and against so many obstacles set in their path. First and foremost, obviously, I mean those who lost family and friends nearly 40 years ago now at Hillsborough. Then of course there are those, whoever they are, and there are many, who realised the monstrosity of what had happened at Hillsborough and the monstrosity of the ensuing cover-up, and who remained determined to see justice for those killed and for future generations.
I congratulate the Government on putting these changes into their manifesto and on bringing it to Parliament as a government Bill. However, to praise and support a Bill is not the same thing as saying it is perfect in its present form. I really want this to work as an Act of Parliament but I have to confess that, for me at the moment, the proposed legal aid scheme for inquests seems far from satisfactory, and if persevered with it might seriously affect how well it works in practice. It is how it works in practice that matters.
I do not want to be misunderstood. I obviously welcome the wide increase in the future availability of legal aid at inquests for victims of disasters or state-related deaths. The obligation which means that victims can effectively participate in inquests and the abolition of the means and merits tests are long overdue. It has been argued for years that the present position is deeply unfair, not least by the outstanding Deborah Coles of the organisation Inquest.
Many reports over the years, including that of the commission that I was privileged to chair nine years ago, The Right to Justice, have argued that such changes should happen as soon as possible. Now, at long last, it is happening
“to address any imbalance of power and promote transparency and fairness”,
as the rather excellent Explanatory Notes to the Bill claim.
However, there is some concern that the proposed legal aid fee scheme will, frankly, not be fit to meet the expected increase in relevant inquest cases. The estimate is that they will grow from around 200 to 400 to over 11,000. I personally find that extraordinary and would like to find out what it is based on, but there can be little doubt that there will be an increase. Will there be enough lawyers to do these important cases? Will there be training for those who want to do this work?
A crucial part of this potential problem is the question of whether the proposed legal aid scheme is generous enough to attract the skilled lawyers necessary to make the changes work. This issue arose last year at a meeting held in this building by the All-Party Group on Access to Justice, at which the then Secretary of State, David Lammy, was a speaker. It is a position that has been argued for in documents and briefings that we have received from both the Law Society and the Bar Council.
Another issue to be settled—and which has been raised already—is at what stage legal aid for victims arises. Often, it is fairly obvious early on that there will be interested parties involved many months before the inquest commences, even though their involvement is not formally announced for a long time. For how long should victims have to pay for their lawyers, who they need at an early stage, before the legal aid scheme comes into force?
My last point is that legal aid resources are, of course, limited. There is a concern, shared by a number of people who work in this area, that these changes may result in some of the other legal aid spend being decreased unless the Government take action and ensure this does not happen. I am referring to vital spend on early advice, housing law, benefits, debt and other crucial areas. This Government have taken some desperately needed action in the last two years, but there is no doubt that the ravages caused by the outrageous and ill thought-through Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act have been and continue to be disastrous for this vital sector.
I end my remarks by asking the Minister whether he would be good enough to meet me and others who are concerned about this important aspect of the Bill for a discussion concerning these issues. I am grateful to him. I repeat my support for the Bill and hope for its implementation soon.
Lord Carter of Haslemere (CB)
My Lords, coming towards the end of this debate, I will not repeat points made in the truly excellent speeches we have heard across the House. I am going to focus on a slightly different aspect, which is none the less very relevant to the spirit of the Bill and merits becoming part of the letter of it. The Bill will impose a duty on authorities to
“act with candour, transparency and frankness in their dealings with inquiries”.
They will be statutorily required to act with accountability and openness. The Bill applies to government Ministers and government departments, but there is one respect in which the Government will not be required to act with such candour, transparency and accountability, and it sticks out like a sore thumb. Despite the vast sums of taxpayers’ money spent on statutory and non-statutory inquiries, the Government are not required to be open with the public or give reasons if they decide not to implement inquiry recommendations.
The UK has spent at least £1.5 billion on completed inquiries since 1990, with active ongoing inquiries continuing to cost taxpayers upwards of £200 million a year. These are eye-watering sums of taxpayers’ money. How can a Government be free to spend millions, sometimes hundreds of millions, of pounds of taxpayers’ money on an inquiry initiated because of “public concern”, and then be under no obligation even to give reasons to the public for rejecting its recommendations? The NAO has estimated that 55% of inquiry recommendations are not accepted by the Government, or, somewhat equivocally, are “accepted in principle” but with no recorded follow-up. This is extraordinary when an inquiry’s recommendations are made on the basis of months or years of painstaking evidence-gathering to establish the facts and hear from experts.
For the Government then to be able to hold back the reasons for declining to accept the inquiry’s recommendations demonstrates a lack of accountability which is entirely at odds with this Public Office (Accountability) Bill now before us. Let us compare recommendations in prevention of future deaths reports issued by coroners. The Government are under a statutory duty to respond within 56 days and to give reasons if they choose not to implement them. Like inquests, inquiries are also often initiated because of events which have resulted in fatalities, so there is no good reason why there should be this disparity with coroners’ prevention of future deaths reports.
Our Solicitor-General seems to be of a similar mind. At Report in the other place, just a week or so before he was appointed, he tabled amendments to the Bill requiring a review of the merits of a new independent oversight body to collate, analyse and follow up on the conclusions and recommendations of inquiries and inquests to improve implementation of them. He said,
“At present, there is a critical gap in accountability between the issuing of a report or recommendation and its eventual implementation … There needs to be candour and transparency in how public authorities respond to, and act on, findings and recommendations … otherwise, these costly, lengthy legal processes are futile”.—[Official Report, Commons, 14/7/26; cols. 824-25.]
In 2024, the House of Lords Select Committee on inquiries, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Norton, made a similar recommendation and suggested a new Joint Select Committee of Parliament which would publish inquiry reports and government responses and monitor the implementation of recommendations. It is a point mentioned by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy. That committee also recommended that the Government be under a duty to give reasons for not implementing inquiry recommendations. In a Bill about openness and accountability in relation to inquiries, the duty to give such reasons should be front and centre. The public should at the very least be entitled to know why the Government have not implemented particular recommendations. It is not asking much.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
The noble Lord, Lord Carter of Haslemere, and earlier the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy, raise a very important point. There is no point in passing a law under which you have to tell the truth at inquiries if, when the inquiries conclude, nothing happens. That is the problem with just passing laws.
Maybe surprisingly, the one speech by the former Prime Minister and soon to be former MP, Keir Starmer, that I found moving and stirring related to the Hillsborough Bill. He said it was a law for the victims of
“all the countless injustices over the years, suffered by working people at the hands of those who were supposed to serve them”.
I genuinely choked up. He went on to name-check Horizon, Grenfell, infected blood, grooming gangs and Windrush. How depressing that we can all think of so many more examples of truth and justice being concealed behind the closed ranks of the state. The powerful speeches we have heard today reflect this. The idea of politicians admitting to this and even compelling public bodies and officials to be held accountable for state-related harms to ordinary people just feels momentous. Yet I have some qualms about overclaiming and hype, proclaiming that the law will shift the balance of power and lead to a culture change per se, as other noble Lords have noted. It all feels more serious than that, because, to be frank, we are in the midst of a democratic crisis.
Over the Recess I read the UK Extremism and Democratic Resilience Centre’s report, Britain Under Strain—holiday-reading fun. The report details the data showing a chronic erosion of trust in the state that reached “historically low levels” and notes that a lack of faith in effective governance is deeply embedded in public opinion across left and right and all age groups. Shockingly, a growing number of the populace believe that the foundational bargain between the state and citizens is failing. Research and polling show that 61% believe the social contract—that stabilising web of reciprocal obligations that holds society together—is broken. Only 23% think it still works, and it is the state that is in breach of contract, not the public. That perception extends across demographic and socio-economic metrics. In other words, disillusion and collapse of trust have become mainstream—and is it any wonder?
We might all argue about which example was the straw that broke the camel’s back. For me, it was following the oral evidence phase of the Nottingham inquiry. What a display of evasion, incompetence and even indifference. Multiple state agencies that had contact with a high-risk and non-compliant patient with a history of violence, Valdo Calocane, somehow failed to keep him under effective supervision, discharged him unmedicated into the community, failed to execute a live warrant, and on and on. That allowed him to murder Grace O’Malley-Kumar, Barnaby Webber and Ian Coates.
It is unbearable that these were preventable deaths, and it is unbelievable that the exposé of the details—the answers swerved and the interpretation of the legalistic double-speak—became public only because the victims’ families took to social media to tell us what happened in the inquiry. I give a special shout out to Emma Webber, who painstakingly filmed daily updates of the horrors prised open begrudgingly in that inquiry. I still cannot believe that no one has lost their job over it all.
While I despise those weaselly words that we hear, “lessons will be learned”—they rarely are—there actually were lessons from that inquiry about how parliamentary deliberations and the small print of laws that we pass can impact on operational decisions in the real world, sometimes with unintended consequences. For example, in the 2025 Theemis homicide review into Valdo Calocane’s care, it was found that NHS staff were acutely conscious of the legislative debate surrounding the Mental Health Bill about the alleged disproportionate use of coercive detention of Black and Afro-Caribbean patients. So, after Calocane tried to break into a neighbour’s flat, one doctor was leaning towards detention, but the inquiry counsel noted that the clinical team worried over representation of young Black men being sectioned, referencing the Bill, and chose monitoring in the community instead. Hours later, Calocane broke into another flat and a woman was so terrified that she jumped out of the window, sustaining horrible injuries.
There is a cautionary note here: however much we broadly support the spirit of this legislation—and we all do—we have an obligation to raise critical concerns and ensure that the drafting and terminology are tight, clear and unambiguous, and we should not be overly rushed. We must ensure that there are guardrails so that we do not overcriminalise. The Law Society asks whether there is a risk that institutions keen to avoid criminal liability may resort to data dumping. We have to ensure that the criminal offence of misleading the public does not stifle legitimate political disagreement or debate, and that honest mistakes are taken as honest and we do not punish the wrong people.
Finally, those who have emphasised that law change is not enough, and that we need a culture change, are absolutely right. But I worry when culture change is seen as deliverable by codes of conduct. I dread endless training sessions in candour and ethics. HR departments will have a field day, but I do not know what it will achieve. What I remember most vividly from Hillsborough, when growing up, was that the officially endorsed cultural attitude was contempt for football fans, who were talked about as scum. It is sad to say that such visceral snobbery about working class people is still prevalent. We heard it in the vile demonisation of Brexit voters as ignorant, duped deplorables; the name calling doled out at those worried about asylum hotels or HMOs in their areas, who were smeared as racist; the treatment of those who, for years, tried to talk about rape grooming gangs and who were labelled Islamophobic; and the young girls—child victims of gross sexual abuse—who went to the police and were arrested as prostitutes.
Most members of the public have not been stonewalled at inquiries, but they have been gaslit by politicians who evade using candour with voters, and they have been hectored and hounded to dial down their fury for speaking inconvenient truths about state cover-ups. They are the real whistleblowers we should value. The public know when things are going wrong, so taking public concerns seriously is the culture change we need. That is how we will know when things are going wrong at the heart of the state, and we, at the heart of the state, should listen to them, not stonewall them or gaslight them. This Bill is the start, but it is the tip of the iceberg.
Lord Sikka (Lab)
My Lords, I welcome the Bill and congratulate all campaigners who helped to secure the duty of candour and extend human rights. However, I have several concerns. The Bill imposes a duty of candour only after a formal inquiry, inquest or government-led review has started. Such inquiries are preceded by years of toil, by whistleblowers and concerned citizens, but there is no duty of candour for those stages.
There are numerous examples showing that state officials go to enormous lengths to conceal information and prevent reviews and inquiries. The DWP fought for years to avoid publishing a damning report into Errol Graham, who weighed just four and a half stone when his body was discovered by bailiffs attempting to evict him in 2018. His benefits were wrongly stopped. Subsequently, the DWP conducted a safeguarding review of vulnerable benefit claimants. The Child Poverty Action Group submitted a freedom of information request for a copy of the review. The DWP refused and spent £50,000 on legal fees to prevent this release. Three years after the original FoI request, a tribunal forced the Government to release the information. So can the Minister explain why there is no duty of candour at all stages when officials interact with the public at large?
The Bill invokes the concept of protected information, which for years has been used to avoid accountability. Let me give just one example. In 2006, I began a five and a half-year chase to secure a document relating to the forcible closure of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International in July 1991. It was the biggest banking fraud of the 20th century. Thousands of people lost their savings. The Government invoked exemptions in the FoI, including national security, to justify denial, even though most of the information they were concealing was already sitting in the US Congress Library. In 2011, three judges unanimously ruled against the Government. The document was not about spy satellites or troop movements; it was about how the Government were covering up the biggest banking fraud and protecting the Middle East royal families. The Government had used BCCI to fund al-Qaeda, murderers, smugglers and sundry in the war in Afghanistan. To this day, there has been no inquiry into the closure of BCCI, and the Bill does not really explain how it will deal with the misuse of this concept of protected information.
Clause 4 of the Bill applies the duty of candour to non-public entities, which could be private entities, including those that provide services to a public authority such as the NHS. The duty will apply to private healthcare providers only if they are providing care under NHS contracts, not otherwise. Why is that? Why is there no duty of candour on giant corporations whose practices affect our daily lives even more than the state?
The Post Office scandal is one of the triggers for the Bill, and I have concerns here about the Government’s candour. On numerous occasions, I have raised issues about the 100 or so prosecutions of postmasters by DWP. On 27 February 2025, the Minister for the Department for Business and Trade and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology told this House:
“My noble friend Lord Sikka raised a question about the DWP convictions. I can assure him that the Minister for Transformation is looking into this, a review is being established, and I hope to provide more information about that”.—[Official Report, 27/2/25; col. 1880.]
Nothing has been heard since.
I organise an annual event on 16 December to review progress and issues relating to the scandal. Ahead of last year’s event, I directly contacted No. 10. It arranged a meeting with the Minister for Transformation. That meeting took place on 27 January 2026, and I learned that there has been no review. Indeed, there is no reviewer. None has been appointed. In March 2026, the DWP advertised for a part-time reviewer, possibly working only for 30 days, to do the reviews. In response to a freedom of information request on 22 July 2026, the DWP said that
“the process of appointment is still underway”.
It refused to reveal the exact terms of reference for the reviewer. So, 20 months after the initial statement to this House, there has been no update, no review and no reviewer; no one has been appointed, there are no meetings with survivors or their families. In the spirit of candour, I invite the Minister to investigate this disappointing chain of events and return to this Chamber to explain to the House why for 20 months there has been no candour about what has been going on.
Baroness Kramer (LD)
My Lords, after a day of extraordinarily brilliant speeches from people who have an understanding that goes way beyond mine, I am going to keep to a fairly narrow topic: whistleblowing.
The duty of candour is intended to deter wrongful behaviour and cover-ups and to expose them if they happen. That goal requires people to be confident to speak out—in other words, to blow the whistle—hopefully long before we reach the crisis point of an inquiry. Whistleblowers are also crucial voices at inquiries. But two fears hold people back from speaking out: the fear that the issue will not be investigated, and the fear that they will face detriment and retaliation for speaking out.
The existing whistleblowing framework that we have in place today does not eradicate those two fears. Whistleblowers are regularly ignored, silenced, and often pay a high personal price—finding that their career and their financial future are in ruins. The protections that do exist under PIDA and under employment rights apply only to a very narrow definition of workers and not to many people whose voices are absolutely critical.
The Bill takes some steps forward in Clause 10(5) by adjusting the code of ethical conduct. But the steps are not sufficient and, indeed, the requirements introduced into the code would almost certainly be met by the existing whistleblowing provisions in virtually every part of the public and private sectors—the very provisions that have tragically failed to prevent or expose serious wrongs, whether it is in the NHS, the police or transport. People have heard so many examples today; I could go on.
The preferred Liberal Democrat solution would be an independent office of the whistleblower, functioning as a hub with spokes to the various public authorities, regulators and enforcement agencies. The office would provide an independent, clear and simple channel for protected disclosures; ensure that, when reasonable, the appropriate authority, regulator or enforcement agency investigates; and prevent or counter retaliation or detriment for speaking out. I recognise that this is likely to be beyond the scope of the Bill. A narrower office could be set up under the Civil Service Commission and thereby come within scope. It is not ideal, but some people may come to the conclusion that it would at least be something.
At the very least, the Bill needs to tackle head-on the most serious issues that whistleblowers face. There is no mechanism in the Bill to ensure that whistleblower information is properly triaged and that reports with merit are then investigated. Just as importantly, the Bill, including the code of ethical conduct, ignores the issue of detriment and retaliation, both formal and informal. I am sure that amendments will be tabled to require public authorities to initiate investigations when in receipt of meaningful information and to counter retaliation, and I hope to support a number of them.
I suspect that the Minister will respond to my issues by saying that a review of the whole whistleblowing framework will begin this autumn, but we have already had such a review: it was initiated by the Department for Business and Trade in March 2023 and published in July 2025. Much good that has done us, despite some excellent work by the authors at Grant Thornton. Experience warns us that reviews are long-grass strategies. I am very concerned that the practical application of the Public Office (Accountability) Bill—surely, we owe effective application of the Bill to all those who have campaigned so long and hard and in such difficult circumstances—could be undermined by the real-life effect of ignoring whistleblowing issues.
Like other speakers, I am determined not to endanger the safe passage of the Bill—it is far too important to be delayed. But I also believe that we should seize the opportunity to strengthen whistleblowing protections not only for public officials but for the many others, such as contractors, clients and suppliers, about whom this Bill needs to speak out. The duty of candour will always be far more effective if those who speak out have confidence that wrongful behaviour will be investigated and that they will not become the victims of retaliation and detriment for the act of speaking out.
Baroness Sanderson of Welton (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, and I think she raises some really valid concerns about whistleblowing. I know it is late, but I am just going to take a moment to echo other noble Lords who have welcomed the Minister—the noble Lord, Lord Lemos—to his place. I too would like to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, for the care that she took on this Bill previously.
I welcome this Bill. It is the result of many years of campaigning from the Hillsborough families. But, like the noble Lords, Lord Bichard and Lord Carlile of Berriew, I cannot help feeling slightly conflicted. When I told my husband what this Bill was about—making sure that when a public authority has failed, all those with any knowledge or responsibility will be completely truthful and transparent about what went wrong—he was incredulous. “Doesn’t that happen already?”, he asked. “Do you really need a law for that?” But no, as we know, it does not happen—as you well know if you have had the terrible misfortune to be part of any of the scandals of the last 30 years and more.
That is the reality, and whatever we feel about it, on the face of it, that means that this is a very good Bill. It is about taking responsibility and holding public bodies to account, something that we all support across this House. But however good its intentions, this Bill is not a panacea, and I think it is really important that we are honest about that. Let us not overpromise, because if you are involved in an inquiry or inquest where this duty applies, you have already been let down on a scale that is life-altering.
I think it is important to take a moment, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy, did earlier, to mention the NHS duty, which did not quite work out as intended, despite having been in existence for nearly 12 years. I had a look at the Government’s 2024 review of that duty, and it is pretty clear that it did not lead to the desired culture change—94% of patients said that providers had failed to engage meaningfully and compassionately following a safety incident—nor did it always increase transparency. There were some healthcare professionals admitting they are or were reluctant to complete a duty of candour for fear of blame or declaring their own guilt. That last finding tallies with the Ockenden review, which highlighted the notable reduction of reported moderate harm incidents following the duty’s introduction.
I am sure that the Minister will tell me—and of course he is right—that this duty is different. It is more far-reaching and, we hope, more straightforward, and of course it has new criminal enforcement mechanisms. I really hope that it does lead to the necessary change in behaviour. I would also be interested, as others have mentioned, to know what thinking has gone into ensuring better compliance and also that the sanctions will deter, rather than embed, defensiveness, as has happened in healthcare.
In the other place, the right honourable Member for Godalming and Ash, Jeremy Hunt, who introduced the duty, identified a different problem with regard to lawyers who advise trusts not to say anything when there is a risk of legal action. It is something we may wish to look at here, along with another of his amendments, which would require information to be provided to a person who or family that has or may have been harmed, not just to those conducting investigations or reviews. I appreciate that this would expand the scope of the Bill somewhat, but it is interesting, first, because it would potentially bring forward the timeframe in which families get the answers they are seeking, and secondly, because it would give victims and families the agency that the noble Lord, Lord Wills, spoke about so eloquently.
I am sure the Minister will not be surprised to hear that this brings me on to the Independent Public Advocate. When the role was established under the Victims and Prisoners Act, it was acknowledged that although it would not have statutory powers to hold public bodies to account, the IPA should become a figure of recognised integrity and authority—someone who institutions cannot brush off or ignore. In Cindy Butts, the first IPA, we are incredibly fortunate because we have such a person, but she can establish the role only with the proper support and the right structural frameworks, so I was surprised and perhaps disappointed not to see any mention of the IPA in the Bill. To that end, I will join with others in looking at amendments that would incorporate the role of the IPA, given its specific purpose to support victims, survivors and bereaved families. As my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead said so powerfully, the IPA is the only person within the system whose sole purpose it is to support them and who could do it to a far greater degree than we currently allow for.
The Bill has provisions in terms of legal aid and parity and equality of arms, as we have heard, but this is about more than legal representation. As the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, said, it is about the relationship between the public and the state. I think we all agree that, fundamentally, the Bill is about rebuilding trust when trust in the system has been smashed to pieces. For many, the IPA will be the first crucial step in that process. I hope the Minister has heard the strength of feeling and support for the IPA across the House.
Finally, there is a third element, which has already been highlighted by the noble Lords, Lord Beamish and Lord Carter of Haslemere, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy: the need for some form of oversight in terms of inquiry recommendations and coroners’ prevention of future death reports. However, I accept that that is not for this Bill and appreciate that work is going on in tandem, which is good news. With that work, the Bill and an IPA that is supported to become truly effective and not merely a signposting position, we will end up with something that can deliver the justice and accountability that we all seek and the public deserve.
Baroness Goudie (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Sanderson. There are a number of issues that we agree on, and I will not repeat them. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Lemos on the work he is doing on the Bill and look forward to working with him on some of the issues that I have been working on. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Levitt, who is a very good friend, on the work she has done on the Bill and thank her very much for the time that she given to so many people. She has gone over and above. I thank the Hillsborough families and the families of victims of other awful incidents that have happened where people have not been able to find the truth, who I had the pleasure to work with and meet. I thank the organisations that arranged all the meetings that we were able to have, including our one-to-one meetings on Zoom and so on with families. It is so important, and they all welcome the Bill very much.
I welcome this Second Reading of the Hillsborough law Bill. I start by paying my respects to the victims of the 1989 disaster and the bereaved families who have campaigned tirelessly for nearly four decades to receive their most basic need: the truth about what happened to their loved ones. I welcome the Bill and believe that it will significantly strengthen our judicial system and the processes that affect survivors, families and victims. The Bill embodies what the duty of candour is: to supplement and strengthen data and its disclosure.
First, I will take a moment to discuss the role of the survivor and the bereaved family—who quite often are ignored and pushed aside—within the new process due to be established. The Hillsborough families, devastated by the loss of their loved ones, spent decades in pursuit of information on what happened that tragic day. Without help from others they would not have got there. I thank all those who helped to give them the strength to continue with their fight, while all the while state institutions actively acted in what was a cover-up. This compounded the tragedy of their loss, with their journey for the truth taking decades of pain and anger at the systems that should have protected them. What these families experienced reflected a wider culture where candour had become a rare exception.
I therefore welcome the
“duty of candour and assistance”
that forms the heart of the Bill. During the process of designing ethical codes of practice and conduct, I hope that the Government take heed of the advice of families who have witnessed the system at first hand and work in close consultation with those who have lived through the process, so that the changes reflect the needs of those affected most deeply in practice. A survivor-centred approach is crucial to make this work for those families and for future families and individuals who may have to go through these situations, as we have seen in the health service recently and in other incidents that have been mentioned tonight, so that the delivery is both appropriate and sensitive to their needs and care, and so that they are not pushed aside.
Secondly, I turn to the Bill’s provisions for legal aid and parity of representation. Extending non-means-tested legal aid to bereaved families at inquests where a public authority is an interested person is a significant and welcome step that corrects the imbalance that has long left grieving families representing themselves or with a friend, quite often without legal help, against a well-resourced state body. We know from Inquest how it has had to work with families to try to get the truth. It is absolutely important that the legal aid budget should be increased. It is not about moving money from one place to another. The legal aid budget must be increased to take care of these issues, not move them about. We have had too many cuts in legal aid over the past 10 years; it is important that that is taken into account. It is key to making the Bill work. We have support from the Law Society, the Bar Council and from other legal entities.
The number of cases could be even more than thought. I think that the figure that I know people are quite worried about is right. I have asked various people about it and it could go up to 11,000, which shows how great the need has been.
Also, we really have to ensure that families do not have to go to other people to raise money. It should be a natural way of life that legal aid should be available. They should be represented properly and to know what happened at that time. The legal profession must ensure that providers’ capacity and funding keep pace with this welcomed expansion.
The Bill gives the bereaved families and survivors, many of whom are women who have carried this campaign for years, a firmer foundation on which they can seek the truth. Although the Bill cannot change the culture overnight, it marks significant progress in our protection of those who have been harmed by the state’s institutions and will dissuade future cover-ups—we do not know what has happened in these recent railway incidents and other ones that have happened just recently. It is important that the Bill is passed and that it works. How it is going to work is what matters after we get the Bill through. We all then have to work on the next stage of how it is implemented.
Baroness Cavendish of Little Venice (CB)
My Lords, so many of the points I was going to make have been made by others far more powerfully than I can, so I will try to be as brief as possible, given that we are coming to the late stage of the evening. Many of us here know what it is like to come up against an opaque, prevaricating, evasive state. I have had the honour of working with many whistleblowers over many years as a journalist and on the board of the Care Quality Commission, which itself missed Mid Staffs, for example. Let us remember, when we expect public servants to delegate their consciences to regulators, that the regulators are also very often flawed.
By the way, not every whistleblower is genuine: there are many people with personal vendettas and many people who have become so emotionally harmed by their involvement in situations that they are not always coherent, so triaging these systems is very difficult. Not every case is simple, and not every case is black and white at all. That is one of the reasons why it is so important that we understand the nuance of this debate.
One of the things I have observed over many years is that the more agencies are involved and the bigger the state becomes, the easier it is for people to cover up and pass the buck. That is one of the things we saw in the Horizon scandal, and it is true of almost every single scandal that we have in our public life. I would simply warn every single Member in this Chamber who has at some point in this debate proposed yet another agency, ombudsman or committee that, in my view, that will not solve anything. It is so much easier to get to the truth when systems are simpler, and very often, with the best will in the world, we make them more and more complicated.
We must get the Bill right. We all agree on the objectives absolutely, and it is shocking, as many have said, that it has taken 37 years to get to this point or that we even need to. But changing culture is not just a question of issuing codes of conduct. Others have made that point: the noble Baroness, Lady Sanderson, eloquently described how the duty of candour, which has existed in the NHS since 2012—I was involved in that—has not worked. I would be very interested if the Minister could clarify the Government’s assessment of that and how they think this duty of candour will be different, because I can tell them that it has not worked. One of the reasons it has not worked is that the bill for clinical negligence is going up and up in the NHS, and it is not in anyone’s interest to raise that bill.
One of the many issues discussed at the time when that original duty was introduced into the NHS was what we had learned from the airline industry, which significantly reduced crashes after the 1970s by completely reforming the way in which people in that industry communicated with each other. What they did was introduce a no-blame culture. That is very unfashionable, and it was unfashionable when Jeremy Hunt raised it many years ago. But in the gap that we are identifying in this debate—the gap between the need to get to the truth quickly and the eventual public inquiry if there has been a cover-up—I would maybe urge some consideration as to how we get to the truth early and rapidly through a no-blame culture rather than, as the Bill appears to do, loading more blame. As the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, so eloquently described, people are human and want to believe what they want to believe. People do not always know what the truth is or that they are covering it up.
I have a number of short questions. I really think that, as others have said, the IPA should be referenced in the Bill and have proper support, and I would like to understand why it has not been.
Another question is this. The noble Lord, Lord Lemos, said earlier that the Bill creates a deliberately high threshold, and that is something we all agree with, but I am not quite clear how it will do that, given the expansive terms and definitions used in the Bill. There are many lawyers in this House who might suggest that terms such as “reckless” and “misleading” have quite broad definitions, and I would like to understand how the Government intend to restrict the criminalisation and the prosecutions to a relatively small number of extreme examples and tragedies.
What level of increased case load for the police and the criminal justice system have the Government assessed? Are they going to resource the police and the criminal justice system properly to record the incidents and investigate them? That is separate from prosecuting, because we are going to have to deal with an awful lot of allegations, proven and unproven, in order to get to the truth.
Lastly, can we do more, as others have mentioned, to reward and help whistleblowers? Clause 10 gives greater protection to whistleblowers, and there is much to welcome in the Bill, but can we do more to actually elevate the whistleblowers who help us get to the truth? I imagine that “Mr Bates vs The Post Office” has done more for public officials who want to do their job properly in this country than anything we have done, because people know that it is the right thing to do to stand up to power.
One of the things that we on the CQC board did after Mid Staffs was to ensure that while most of the board left, one of the only people who remained as a non-executive director was Kay Sheldon, one of the whistleblowers from the CQC end who was brave enough to stand up and give evidence to the public inquiry. She was accused of having mental health problems and dragged through the mud. It was utterly disgraceful. But the board acted to keep her on for a second term, which was a very important signal of our desire to promote a genuine culture of openness in the organisation.
We can all think of a number of people, such as Feargal Sharkey with the water companies, and other campaigners who ought to be on the boards of some of these public agencies, because they embody precisely the values that we are talking about. That is perhaps something to think about.
We need cultures in which staff feel empowered to act to prevent harm in everyday events—a lot of these things start with everyday events—without fear of recrimination or blame. That means changing leadership and culture and getting at what I am afraid my own profession, the media, does frequently: the “make heads roll” culture. It means getting underneath to junior levels of staff, to give them more confidence. It means not immediately criminalising all these activities.
For that reason, I strongly endorse the suggestion by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy, that we should form a committee to look at this again in two or three years. We do not know whether this will work, where it will work or how well it will work. I desperately hope it will work, but I feel that we will need to monitor the situation closely to see whether this can do something different from the duties of candour that we already have in our public life.
Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)
My Lords, as the final Back-Bench speaker I know a lot has been said, but I would like to give a perspective from Northern Ireland. I welcome the opportunity to participate in the debate. I welcome the Minister, my noble friend Lord Lemos, to the Front Bench, and the participation of my noble friend Lady Levitt.
I congratulate all those people who suffered immeasurable grief at Hillsborough on 15 April 1989 on their tenacious campaigning. It is through their campaigning and that of many public representatives in Liverpool and beyond, including the current Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, that this landmark legislation was achieved. But we must not forget the victims of Grenfell, the Post Office scandal, the infected blood issue, sodium valproate and the mesh. On all these issues, people were confronted with a lack of closure, information and transparency. They deserve those things, and I hope that this legislation will be the vehicle that will provide them with that necessary closure, accountability, truth and, above all, justice.
From a Northern Ireland perspective, I have a couple of questions for my noble friend the Minister. First, can he confirm when the legislative consent Motion will be approved by the Northern Ireland Executive and the Assembly, and whether he has had any discussions with the Executive and Assembly regarding the passage of the legislative consent Motion? Secondly, I have been contacted by the victims’ and survivors’ commission and Amnesty International in Northern Ireland, which want to ensure that the Bill, which they support, introduces a duty of candour and that it applies to all, to ensure the necessary accountability and transparency. Those bodies representing victims in Northern Ireland want the duty of candour to apply to all, including the security services, which for too long have been cloaked in secrecy and, in some instances, shielded people from the truth.
It is not clear to us—we will seek clarification—that the draft legislation as it stands will apply the duty of candour to ICRIR, the succeeding body of which will be the Legacy Commission. On this point, the definition of “inquiry” and “investigation” in paragraph 8 of Schedule 1 to the Public Office (Accountability) Bill applies only to other investigations, but the definition of an investigation is broad. We would like clarification on that. If the duty of candour does not apply to any ICRIR successor bodies, there will be a serious and deeply concerning inequity between reinstated inquests and the Legacy Commission investigations, including inquisitorial proceedings. This is especially a concern given the intent to funnel investigations concerning sensitive information to a new Legacy Commission.
I have already given my noble friend the Minister sight of my question in relation to this issue. The duty of candour must apply to all Troubles investigations. Can my noble friend the Minister offer the assurance today that it will?
Finally, credit for this legislation must go to the Hillsborough campaigners, their families, their public representatives, the Prime Minister and the Government, for their persistence in seeking truth and accountability for those who have been wronged—in 1989, since then and even before then. That is what we are looking to see. I see this legislation as the vehicle and the pathway to do just that.
Baroness Brinton (LD)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, and to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Lemos, to his new role and thank him for meeting with us last week. I also want to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, for all the work she did on the Bill earlier in the summer.
I declare an interest as a director of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust. Police Spies Out of Lives, which is run by victims in the Spycops case, came to the trust some years ago and asked us if we would help it find some support for the beginning of the inquest. “Yes”, we said: “Two years”. We are still funding it 11 years on, and that is an absolute scandal.
I start with a tribute from these Benches to all the victims and families in the Hillsborough tragedy, but also to the many, many others to whom noble Lords have referred during the debate today. I am also grateful to the many organisations which have engaged with us and sent us briefings.
Regardless of where the briefings have come from—whether charities working with victims of appalling injustice at the hands of the state, or legal and health bodies with formal roles in delivering transparent and accountable services—there is one clear message for this Government, which I think they should be encouraged by. We need this Bill, but it does need strengthening—we have heard that from most sides of the House today—or perhaps it will not work quite as Ministers want.
The noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, said that we need a duty of candour because the Hillsborough police admitted that they lied. I was very taken with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, who spoke about how trust had been lost as a result of the many shocking cases. We have to make this Bill work, but, importantly, officials—police, in the Hillsborough case that the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, mentioned—not lying in the first place must be the fundamental starting point.
As we have heard, the origins of this Bill—often called the Hillsborough law—are the disaster in 1989 and the decades-long campaign by the families and survivors, including the work of our new Prime Minister. The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, spoke on the impressive but tragic effectiveness of families and survivors. One of the things that impressed me most with my portfolio, covering most of the inquiries and compensation schemes, is how the survivors of one issue get in touch and work with their colleagues on others. That has been one of the few really positive things I have seen over the last few years. The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, was right that the lies told that day are an absolute stain on the police, but as we now know, this has been the case in other tragedies as well.
We on these Benches have consistently supported the principle of a duty of candour. We will scrutinise the Bill to ensure that it delivers genuine accountability and works in practice. Our specific concerns remain on implementation, legal aid, whistleblowing enforcement and senior responsibility. That sounds like an awful lot of things, but they are all woven into each other.
Many of our concerns are based on experiences we have heard from those who have been victims. I have worked closely in the last few years with the infected blood survivors and victims. There is still a very unsatisfactory response after 50 years. I met some of the students who were at Lord Mayor Treloar School 51 years ago. The boys who had haemophilia—who I did a theatre workshop with, and they helped me with cooking for my theatre group—are dead, all of them. They were infected by a doctor who did not tell either them or their parents that they were guinea pigs for a new type of blood that had come from America. The noble Baroness, Lady May, said that the Hillsborough lies started on that day, but the same was not true for these children. There was a lie of omission. Those children were absolutely deserted. No one has been held to account for that and, although some cases are being looked at by the police, many of the doctors and officials who did that are now dead, and there is no paperwork whatsoever from that long ago.
But it is not just about the past. For the infected blood community, even last month, one of the previous compensation schemes, the English Infected Blood Compensation Scheme, wrote to a number of the widows in the scheme saying that they had erroneously been given money and it must be repaid immediately. They would be allowed a year, but in some cases that is up to £1,000 a month and they are widows on pensions. This group of victims has not even been able to start to apply for what they are entitled to under the new scheme that was set up two years ago because they are affected, not infected, victims. Helpfully, both IBCA and the Government have stopped that. We do not know how many are affected, but it is not in the past—that was just a couple of months ago. Why did a scheme think it was appropriate to do that?
The Post Office Horizon scandal, which has been championed by the noble Lords, Lord Arbuthnot and Lord Beamish, and others, has not resolved matters either. Not only do postmasters not have just settlements but many are still waiting for justice and for their wrong criminal convictions to be overturned. It is also about the new scheme for Capture, which a number of us asked questions about two years ago. I believe what Ministers said at the Dispatch Box: that they believed what they had been told, which was that there was no risk at all from Capture because it was completely different. Two years on, we are discovering that is not the case.
It is about the Grenfell disaster where, 10 years on, justice has still not been delivered to the families of those who died and those who were injured. It is about the Windrush scandal, outlined by my noble friend Lady Benjamin, where people were actually threatened with deportation because papers had been lost. Those were the people who were invited to come to the UK to help us develop our life after the Second World War. It is about the atomic bomb veterans from 60 years ago who are still waiting to get on to the first steps. It is about the victims of childhood sexual abuse, both historic and more recent. The IICSA inquiry report and recent court cases have demonstrated that our children are still not safe without proper mandatory reporting and a duty of candour. It is about the continuing scandal of disabling use of vaginal mesh, as well as sodium valproate being given to young women with epilepsy who became pregnant: 20,000 of their children have developmental and other physical disabilities. Some of that is still happening. This is a real scandal.
In Committee and on Report we will be testing the efficacy of the details of this Bill and whether those scandals and tragedies will be prevented and managed in the future. My noble friend Lady Ludford set out the importance of the ECHR in underpinning the moral framework: that real truth is spoken to power and justice is not denied by the state.
The noble Lord, Lord Howard, explained how public officials and Ministers can unwittingly not tell the truth when it has been hidden from them. I think we have seen that from Ministers from every party in two or three of these scandals: the postmasters and the Horizon scheme saw it, as well as infected blood.
We note and are particularly interested in the Long Title to the Bill. It applies to the conduct of public authorities and public officials at all times and is not confined to post-failure consideration and investigation. We also note the purpose of the Bill defined in Clause 1(2)(b), which imposes a requirement on public authorities to act at all times
“to maintain ethical conduct, candour, transparency and frankness”
and is similarly unconfined.
As others have said, we are particularly concerned in this day and age about that golden thread where public services may commission things but not actually deliver them, and in the relationship of some of the subcontractors and whether they will be caught by this. I know that some people think they will all be; I am not convinced.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, said, we would like to see the enforcement mechanisms in Chapter 2 of Part 2 strengthened on the level applicable by Part 1 to inquiries and investigations: a very clear duty, breach of which gives rise to criminal sanction in the terms of Clause 5, or at least at a comparable level.
The noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich, examined the principles of misconduct in public office and how far it will extend beyond the most senior people or to subcontractors. As I have just said, that is an area we want to look at.
My noble friends Lady Kramer, Lady Hamwee and Lord Rennard on our Benches raised the vital issue of protection of those trying to whistleblow. We do not believe that the Employment Rights Act 1966 and the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998—which amends the previous Bill—both of which set out how whistleblowing is protected, work in practice. The legislation has patently failed, and this Bill will also fail if whistleblowing is not strengthened too. As my noble friend Lady Kramer said, we will bring forward some amendments, as far as we can within scope, to make sure that whistleblowing can start to work, and not just for employees.
In Committee, we will also seek clarification on a number of issues around the applicability of the Bill to subcontractors and their suppliers. The supply chain in the Grenfell Tower tragedy was a particular problem, as some noble Lords outlined.
My noble friend Lady Hamwee rightly asked for clarity on the role and resources of the Independent Public Advocate, supported by the noble Baroness, Lady May, and others. We must not create an important body to set it up to fail.
This Bill will not work without legal aid provision and I will not repeat what many of the people who spoke about it said, except to say that the briefings from the Bar Council and Inquest absolutely said the same thing. There has to be a level playing field for families and survivors. Please let that happen.
The NHS duty of candour is not working, as others have already outlined. In 2013, the Francis report set out the failings in the Mid Staffs Hospital Trust. I will quote just half a paragraph:
“This was primarily caused by a serious failure on the part of a provider Trust Board. It did not listen … to its patients and staff or ensure the correction of deficiencies brought to the Trust’s attention. Above all, it failed to tackle an insidious negative culture involving a tolerance of poor standards and a disengagement from managerial and leadership responsibilities”.
That sounds very familiar because it is almost what Donna Ockenden said in her report earlier this year about the many maternity scandals. We have the evidence that the system in the NHS is not working.
I want to move, as I close, to two things that I think we can hope for in the future. Many noble Lords will know that I am passionate about mandatory reporting for child sex abuse, as outlined in the independent inquiry. We have had a case this last week and I just want to ask the Minister a question. Sally-Anne Bowen was convicted a couple of days ago and, from what has been reported during the trial, we have concerns that the law would not have required the concerns or allegations to be brought to the attention of the statutory authorities at the time. That is why prescribed mandatory reporting is so important. Can the Minister write to me to let me know whether that would be the case?
In summation, we really need prevention—excuse me, a lot of people have coughs today—of the need for compensation. What is a working system? My positive notes are two. France, during the early years of the infected blood scandal, was very different from the UK and Canada. They have a different judicial system from ours and in the late 1980s, the judiciary became really concerned and started to investigate. They brought two cases: one started in 1988 and finished in 1990, another one later in the 1990s. The result was that about six people were brought to trial. One senior health official was found guilty and sent to prison. One very senior Minister was found guilty and not sent to prison—I do not quite know what else happened—but the others were not found guilty, because they were not part of that golden thread of knowledge and the duty of candour therefore could not have applied to them. For the many people who have been concerned, the French have learned how to do this right. The loss of trust in the public as these cases came to light was changed radically by those court cases.
My final very brief example is from Australia, which has introduced mandatory reporting in child sex abuse and has a full duty of candour. But it is not just about the law; there is a no-blame culture throughout the system, whether that is in schools, hospitals or children’s social care. That has taken some time to get right but, as a result, there are now more possible cases being reported, which is actually what we want to see and hear, and staff are not scared that they will lose their job, because they will not. I hope that this is what we will get to at the end of this Bill. We may need to review it after it comes into force, but let us get on with it.
Lord Wolfson of Tredegar (Con)
My Lords, at about 8.30 pm on the evening of Saturday 15 April I came home from synagogue with my late father. As we did every week, we conducted religiously our family’s two rituals. First, there was a short ceremony to mark the end of Shabbat and the beginning of the working week. Secondly, we turned on the radio to get the Liverpool score—and I will never forget what we heard. We did not get the result of a football match. Like the noble Lord, Lord Barber, who I think said that he tuned in after a wedding, we were confronted with a human tragedy.
By that time some, but not all, of the terrible facts were known. The disaster had been unfolding in the national media for about five hours. Many had done their best to help, in dreadful circumstances. I think everybody who heard the personal witness of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester could not help but be incredibly moved by it. By the time we switched on the radio, the death toll was already appallingly high. Shankly, of course, had famously joked that football was more important than life and death. That night, we learned the terrible truth: it is not.
I do not recall that we yet knew that there were 94 victims on that day, whose names are now inscribed on a fitting memorial. We rightly now mourn the 97, with the tragic additions of Lee Nicol a few days later, then later still Tony Bland and then, as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Alton, Andrew Devine, whose family went through particular pain, as the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, reminded us.
I also remember the following morning. Sundays were often quiet in Liverpool, but that Sunday there was an almost palpable sense of silence and loss. Sometimes, of course, there really are no words. In this House, however, we deal only in words, so I come to this Bill with a particular personal background.
I begin by making a point which has already been made by many others. But, if a former President of the Supreme Court has ruled that we can repeat propositions, a mere shadow Attorney-General is content to follow her, and many other noble Lords, in paying tribute to the families of those who died at Hillsborough, to their supporters and, yes, to their lawyers as well, for their extraordinary campaign for truth and accountability. Their resilience over decades has reminded this House of what it means to demand justice.
As I close this debate for these Benches, I thank all noble Lords who have contributed from across the House. There has been genuine engagement with the substance of the Bill. That is precisely what this legislation deserves and, as my noble and learned friend Lord Keen said, it is what we intend to do as well.
There were so many fine speeches. With apologies to others, I will mention just a few. The noble Lord, Lord Roe of West Wickham, spoke powerfully of his experience at Grenfell and in the military. His speech showed how this House benefits from the personal experience of noble Lords. I listened very carefully to his speech, and I hope we will benefit from his input in Committee.
My noble friend Lord Arbuthnot raised the appalling treatment of sub-postmasters by the Post Office, which has had so many devastating consequences. Like Hillsborough, that campaign took far too long; like Hillsborough, that campaign is still ongoing. My noble friend knows more about the Post Office scandal than almost any of us—perhaps if I include the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, I can delete “almost”—and I hope we will benefit from his expertise as the Bill progresses. He made some important points on the scope of the duty of candour. The imputation of knowledge within an organisation sounds like a very dry legal point but, as we have just heard, it is not. It is the sort of thing that lawyers talk about, and people switch off, but in this Bill, it is a point that we need to switch on for, because it is very important.
The noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, spoke powerfully about her own family’s tragic loss as a result of the infected blood scandal. I hope she will bring that experience and passion to our debates in Committee.
Finally—this is certainly not in any order—my noble friend Lady May, in addition to her remarks on the interaction between the Bill and the security services, to which I will return, expressed her dissatisfaction at the omission of any role for the Independent Public Advocate in the Bill. That was a view shared by a number of noble Lords across the House; it is clearly something that merits further debate. I agree with my noble friend that we should be aiming to seek a just and truthful resolution for victims as soon as possible.
About two years ago, this Bill was promised as one of the Government’s first Acts, but here we are in 2026 still debating it. That is because it is complex. But, as my noble and learned friend Lord Keen said, the manner of its scrutiny in the House of Commons is troubling. Significant amendments to the Bill, in particular those addressing the intelligence services and national security, were tabled with about 24 hours’ notice before Commons scrutiny began. The noble Lord, Lord Beamish, was right to explain that the delay was because the issues are so complex. It is important, however, that there is proper scrutiny of a Bill, and it is a matter of fact that the Commons had next to no time to scrutinise those important amendments. It is therefore the responsibility of this House to provide the deliberate, forensic scrutiny that the Commons timetable did not permit. On that point, I am in agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Rooker.
The other point the debate raised is how generous the Minister has been with his time, especially over the Recess. It is appreciated and not taken for granted. I look forward to further interactions with him, both personally and with my colleagues, as the Bill progresses.
My noble friend Lady May, with all her governmental experience, made the point that cumbersome legislation can lead to errors in application and unintended consequences. As a lawyer, I respectfully second that. Clause 6 is clunky and should be looked at carefully to see whether it can be improved. There is a risk that the Bill may make some public officials less candid and less transparent.
One example is vetting information. If this is disclosed at inquiries, or if the net of those who have access to this information is expanded as a result of this legislation, this may deter future witnesses and also damage national security recruitment, because people subject to vetting may become less forthcoming if they fear that their vetting records could be publicly exposed in a courtroom or an inquiry hearing. Of course, to protect national security, the whole point of a vetting process is that it is both candid and thorough, but the Bill must not create a risk that people withhold information which would undermine security rather than improve it. That would also make it more difficult to recruit to sensitive posts. We simply cannot afford to deter talented people from joining the intelligence services, the military, counterterrorism or any number of other posts which require vetting, out of fear that their vetting history may one day be made public. I look to the Minister to provide reassurances on this point, and I can safely say that he can expect us to return to this in Committee.
I will say a few words about the definition of “duty of candour”, because that is one of the main aspects of the Bill. Clause 1 sets out the Bill’s purpose, but the duty of candour itself is articulated as requiring public bodies to act with candour, transparency and frankness, without favour to their own position. As my noble and learned friend Lord Keen set out, there are some fundamental questions about how this operates in practice. When is the duty triggered? Clause 2(3) requires someone to notify an inquiry that their acts or information may be relevant. What does “may be relevant” mean? What is the nature of that connection? Who assesses the relevance? How is the obligation switched off? This was another point made by my noble and learned friend.
Confusingly, at least to me, the concept of full disclosure is mentioned in the Explanatory Notes but is not in the Bill. In the Explanatory Notes it says that public bodies must act
“with candour; promptly and proactively; with full disclosure of evidence—and without favour of their own position”.
But that “full disclosure” is not in the Bill. What, in any event, does “frankness” mean? Is that meant to be the same as full disclosure? There is a concept in the law, as the lawyers among us will know, called full and frank disclosure. That means you have to disclose to the court information which is adverse to your position. Is that what is intended? If it is, this ought to be set out in the Bill. That point was touched on, with all his experience in the law, by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton. If I may say respectfully, he was absolutely right. At the moment, the language is vague, and that vagueness will create a risk of uncertainty for public authorities trying to comply with it.
There is also a question as to how that duty interacts with other duties: the NHS duty of candour under the health and social care regulations; the Freedom of Information Act 2000, which requires disclosure sometimes but also has exemptions from disclosure at other times; data protection law, which restricts disclosure of information; and legal professional privilege. How do all these duties interact? I am not expecting the Minister to explain that in his winding-up speech, but they are points that we are going to have to come back to in Committee.
Clause 10 imposes a duty on public authorities to establish and maintain codes of ethical conduct based on the Nolan principles. The peculiarity here is that this clause has the potential to impose significant administrative and financial burdens on public bodies, but it has not been included in the impact assessment. As the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, explained, this can have a real effect, not only on the services which she was referring to but on other public services.
What work have the Government done to assess how many existing codes of conduct—referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Bichard—already comply with Clause 10? It seems that it has to be one or the other of these alternatives: either these codes of conduct are not burdensome, because the Bill will require only minor tweaks to what is already out there—in which case, do we really need primary legislation to achieve that objective?—or the existing codes of conduct are not compliant and we do need the Bill; in that case, why is the effect of all that not in the impact assessment? It will have a very significant effect on those bodies. Again, the Government have not provided any analysis of the impact, and we will probe that at further stages.
On the new offences of misleading a Minister and the destruction of documents, as the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich, explained, the common-law offences were problematic. I will take a moment to pay tribute to the Law Commission, which is often unsung and should get a bit more credit than it often gets. We do not want to replace a problematic common law with a problematic statutory offence. The points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, merit careful attention from the Government.
We are concerned about whether the deliberate misleading of a Minister by a civil servant in the advice process, undermining the quality of government decision-making, would be included—a point made by my noble friend Lord Howard. Would the deliberate destruction of documents by a public official seeking to conceal evidence be included? If there is ambiguity in the current law, we should explore whether adding explicit statutory language would strengthen the Bill and provide greater clarity.
I will not repeat the points about self-incrimination made by my noble and learned friend Lord Keen in opening, but I will take 20 seconds to highlight that the Bill does not define “recklessness”. That means that the normal definition of “recklessness” will apply. Is that what is intended? Statutes sometimes have a specific definition of “recklessness” for the statute, so I ask the Minister to think about whether we need a particular definition of “recklessness” here.
To pick up a point made by my noble and learned friend Lord Bellamy, you can spot good legislation like you can spot a good shot in cricket: by whether there is a good follow-through. There appears to be merit here in proper post-legislative scrutiny of the Bill and how it operates in practice when it becomes an Act. In the same vein of follow-through, there also appears to be merit, I suggest, in the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Haslemere, that a Government who are deciding not to adopt a recommendation of a public inquiry should at least give reasons for not doing so. Of course, they do not have to adopt a recommendation—they are not passing their pen to the person conducting the inquiry—but they should at least give reasons.
Of course, the changes we have been discussing today cannot ultimately be affected by law. What we all need is cultural change. Law has its limitations, and it is harder to change culture than it is to add to the statute book. The Bill addresses profound constitutional issues: the duty of the state to be honest with the public and the right of bereaved families to truth and accountability. Those are cross-party principles. Perhaps this is one of the rare occasions where I agree entirely with what the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, said about how those principles command support across the House. Our role in this House, and what we will seek to do from these Benches, is to ensure that the Bill’s provisions are both clear and workable, and that they genuinely improve public accountability without creating unintended consequences. It is in that spirit that I look forward to further engagement with the Minister in Committee and beyond, and I am confident that, if we all work together, we can improve the Bill.
Lord Lemos (Lab)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for participating in this debate today. I think all noble Lords will agree with me that it has been an immensely powerful debate, with a deep sense of reflection and consideration, and I greatly welcome the sense of consensus and collaboration that has prevailed throughout the discussion today. That demonstrates—as does the whole genesis of the Bill—a phrase that my noble friend Lord Blunkett used: there is strength in adversity, and it is that strength and the spirit of that which we seek to draw on in taking the Bill forward. I particularly thank the noble Lords who drew on their personal experiences—I was very moved by that.
I have to say that it is a humbling privilege for me to be responsible for progressing the Bill through your Lordships’ House. I am very proud to be doing that and to be following my noble friend Lady Levitt, who has done such a distinguished job to get us to where we are today.
I will seek to address as many of the issues as I can, but I know I will fail. I have not a hope in hell of addressing all the issues that were raised in 45 speeches, and I am not terribly good at namechecking everyone who spoke, but I will try my best. On the detailed comments about scopes made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen of Elie, and the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, for letting me off the hook of having to reply to them all this evening, but I will respond to them in detail, both in writing and in Committee. I have already written to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, on some of these matters, and we will continue to engage in that way.
I promise to write in detail to all noble Lords who have participated in this debate because I know, as I say, that I will get as far as I can but I will not be able to deal with everything. I look forward to continuing to meet with all noble Lords who are interested. Some noble Lords have specifically mentioned that they would like to meet me. I would be delighted to do that, and I will meet with others too. Between now and the debates in Committee, I will also meet with campaigners and family members, including, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, the Devine family—I would be delighted to do that. We shall continue these discussions in Committee.
I will now turn to some specific items that have been raised. My rough rule of thumb is to try to deal with the issues raised by the largest number of Peers, if I can, but I will see how I do. Every one of your Lordships who has spoken in this debate made the point that this is about culture change. If we do not achieve that, we have seriously failed in our duty. I do not have time to namecheck all noble Lords, but I will just mention the noble Lord, Lord Wills, whom I have had the pleasure of speaking to several times, and the work he has done over a long time on all this, and the work that the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has done through the Joint Committee on Human Rights. I was very struck by the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, to which I will return in a moment.
I will first set out the Government’s position on the ways in which we can ensure this is effective at the cultural level as a prevention mechanism. I very much agree with the comments made by the noble Baronesses, Lady Sanderson and Lady Cavendish, that there are strong interdependencies here, and the Bill comes as a package rather than as a series. The Government will publish statutory guidance to support public authorities to establish the codes that the Bill requires, to ensure they meet the requirements of the Bill. We have had a number of important and interesting observations about how we can do that effectively, and I am very happy to continue those discussions. I am very interested to continue discussing how we can, through the Bill, begin to drive ethical behaviour throughout the organisation. A number of noble Lords have made the point about the junior ranks, and I take that very seriously.
I was very struck by the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, on leadership. The noble Lord, Lord Barber, made the same point. We all know that that is the centre of what we are discussing here. The Government, under the former Prime Minister, commissioned the new Ethics and Integrity Commission to work towards becoming a centre for excellence for codes of conduct. That is an independent body and the Cabinet Office duty of candour team is working closely with the officials of the Ethics and Integrity Commission on how we take this forward. As part of that, the Ethics and Integrity Commission will research and develop guidance on codes of ethics that will be published on its website, so all public authorities will have access. But I am not seeking to argue that through those traditional means we can bring about the culture change that we seek.
The observations by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy, on the social and psychological aspects of the changes we are seeking seemed to me very pertinent. This is not just a legal exercise. I was very struck by the phrase of the noble Baroness, Lady Cavendish: we cannot delegate our conscience to regulators. I know that to be true, having worked in private sector and public sector regulation myself, including in the financial services. Regulators can help, but it is our job as legislators and as the Government to set the tone. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, that I always welcome a cricketing metaphor: to follow through on that, I know that is the way to the boundary.
A number of noble Lords made the point about resources and the displacement effect of resources. I want to come back to that in Committee. But my main point is to say that the Government take this very seriously. We have no investment in these codes of ethical guidance being ineffectual or failing, or undermining the whole purpose of the Bill. We want to get this right and we will work closely with your Lordships to do so. We are all on the same side. I was going to say we all share the same scepticism. Scepticism is the wrong word, but we share many of the same concerns that this may not achieve either what we want or as much as we want. We will certainly come back to that.
I turn now to the national security services. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, for her observations and I want to reassure her, and the security services generally, that the Government take very seriously the points that she raises about the sensitivity and the vulnerability of this and how significant it is for national security. But I am pleased that she said she thought the arrangements we have set out are adequate. I also want to thank my noble friend Lord Beamish, who I know, with the Intelligence and Security Committee, has done a lot of work on this to get us to where we are. The Government believe we are in a stable place from which to go forward in a way that both protects national security, including protected information about national security, and ensures that the security and other services are within the scope of the Bill.
I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, for his comments and drawing on his enormous experience, and also my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti, who has played an important role and spoke with great force about the need to protect national security. I note the observation from the noble Baroness, Lady May, on the possibility that these arrangements may be cumbersome. I take that very seriously, particularly as it comes from, if I may say, someone with her experience and distinction. But the Government think that, as far as the national security services are concerned, we have reached a stable and balanced place.
I will say a word or two about the NHS and the duty of candour, because that has been referred to by a number of people. The intention of the NHS duty of candour is to ensure that providers are open and transparent with people who use their services. This duty of candour is different, as noble Lords know, so we hope it will work in a different way.
I reassure my noble friend Lord Blunkett that the duty of candour will apply to all officials, former and current, even if they have new jobs. I was very interested in the comments made by a number of noble Lords about the no-blame culture, which raise some philosophical questions about our whole approach to this and the efforts of Jeremy Hunt in the NHS.
I absolutely assure the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, that the Bill covers the Post Office. A number of noble Lords have spoken about aspects of the Horizon scandal, and I will certainly write specifically about all the questions that surround Horizon.
A number of Lords also raised the Independent Public Advocate. I am very clear that the Government support—I think the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, was very politely questioning this—and welcome the role of the IPA as an extremely important early intervention for victim support. I discussed it with my Commons colleague, Minister Davies-Jones, this morning, and I am meeting Cindy Butts tomorrow. We are very committed to this and we absolutely recognise—as I think I said to the noble Baroness, Lady Sanderson—that a role for the IPA in these situations will be enormously helpful in achieving what I regard as one of the most important goals: to help the families to get to the truth quickly. We are not resistant to all that. I look forward to discussing how that will work in practice with many noble Lords.
A number of issues were raised about legal aid. I do not have the time to go through them all. I will just say that the principle we are working with is to try to correct the asymmetry that exists at inquests between public bodies and families and survivors. That is what we will seek to achieve, not just through the provisions for legal aid, which I am happy to discuss in more detail—I am very happy to meet the noble Lord, Lord Bach, to talk about it further—but through the constraints on public bodies to use legal representation in a proportionate and responsible way that does not place onerous duties on families, the bereaved and survivors.
I turn quickly, in the two or three minutes left to me, to two or three more important issues. On whistleblowing, the prediction that the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, made of how I would respond was correct: we are about to launch a consultation very soon—not “in due course” but very soon. I want to defend where we stand on this. We are talking here about whistleblowing in the public sector, but all noble Lords know that there are many concerns about whistleblowing in the private sector. They may not be quite the same, but the Government are concerned about protecting whistleblowers across the board. That is what we hope to achieve through the work of my colleagues in the Department for Business and Trade and a number of other things. I am afraid that we want to wait for that, but I am very happy to continue to discuss it.
The principle of the role of whistleblowers is already mentioned in the way the Bill is crafted and how the code of ethics is set out—I will not set it out now, in the interest of time. We believe that we have addressed the question of whistleblowing in the way we have drafted the Bill, but we will take it forward for both the public and private sectors. That is our intention and what I hope we will do.
The Hicks campaign was discussed by the noble Lord, Lord Alton. My noble friend Lady Levitt met with my noble friend Lady Kennedy; I would be delighted also to meet with my noble friend Lady Kennedy. The Hicks campaign goes to what I think is one of the hearts of the matter: if families cannot get to the truth quickly, accountability and consequences will not follow. The truth is the foundation stone on which accountability and consequences follow.
I have run out of time. I will just say one or two other things. In relation to Northern Ireland, I want to reassure my noble friend Lady Ritchie that the duty will automatically apply in the limited number of inquests that will resume as a result of the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill. I can reassure her that we are working closely in discussion on how this duty of candour work will be taken up through the legacy commission.
I really am out of time now, but I promise to write on a number of other issues, including misleading Ministers and the destruction of documents and police records. On the extension of this duty to subcontractors, the Government are very open to thinking about that further. We will talk about self-incrimination and the interaction with FOI, which we feel we are in a good place on but are very happy to discuss. We will come back to some of the issues that my noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, raised around the harm threshold. I will also write about historic injustices, command responsibilities and the obligations on parliamentarians.
The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, is in an unusual place. I looked up and saw that her seat was empty.
I will write about how we arrive at our views on public bodies in scope, including universities and financial services. I am sorry that it has been a bit rushed, but I hope that I have dealt with some of the issues, and I promise to deal with the others in writing. I look forward to engaging with all noble Lords at Committee stage. I beg to move.
Lord Lemos
That the bill be committed to a Committee of the Whole House, and that it be an instruction to the Committee of the Whole House that they consider the bill in the following order:
Clauses 1 and 2, Schedule 1, Clauses 3 to 11, Schedule 2, Clause 12, Schedule 3, Clauses 13 to 16, Schedule 4, Clauses 17 to 19, Schedule 5, Clause 20, Schedule 6, Clauses 21 to 28, Title.
Lord Rooker
After “Whole House,” insert “but that Committee stage will not commence until the Minister has made a statement setting out which clauses and schedules of the Bill, including amendments made to the Bill, the House of Commons did not have time to consider on the floor of the House;”.
Lord Rooker (Lab)
My Lords, I do not want to put myself in the doghouse, so I will only be a few minutes. This form of amendment was the only way I could raise the issue that I want to raise, which is, of course, to call on the Government to give us a list of the issues the Commons did not have time to consider. I want to talk about why it did not have time to consider them.
I listened to every speech today, and it is absolutely clear to me that there will be lots of amendments from this House going to the Commons. The purpose of raising the issue in this way is to strengthen the role of the elected Members of the Commons at the expense of the Government. I will make two or three general points, and then I will relate these points to the Bill.
In the Commons on Second Reading, every Bill is guillotined. It calls it a programme Motion. It covers up, and all the Bills are dealt with that way. We started that in 1997, and I freely admit that, on reflection, it was one of the mistakes we made. Governments always want to boast about the number of Bills they pass, which is done at the expense of scrutiny, because they make the programme Motion so tight. It is so tight that areas of Bills are left unscrutinised. So, the Bills arrive in our House with inadequate scrutiny. We end up sending more amendments back to the Commons than would otherwise be the case. Then, when they get to the Commons, the Government in the Commons—not here, of course—blame the Lords for MPs having to do more work on what we have sent back, leading them to call for reform of this House. When we return amendments to the elected Members, they are limited by the programme Motion on the time they can spend on what we send back. By the way, the programme Motion has been changed for the Bill; it is now back to January.
Elected Members need more time for scrutiny. The Government have to return to Parliament some of the power they have taken away with programme Motions designed to fit in more Bills, rather than better Bills. All I am asking for is a list from the Government of what they have not allowed to be scrutinised, and to put back the buck where it belongs: with the Government. I am not complaining about the Commons here.
I first raised this issue about a decade ago, but I accepted, on the information I got, that it was too complicated. On 16 July, I attended the Lord Speaker’s lecture in the River Room and I raised again the fact that we should have a note of what has not been discussed when a Bill arrives in this House that was in the previous House. There was support on that evening, so I decided I had better do something about this. This Bill is the first opportunity, but it can be done on every Bill, as I have informed my noble friend.
On 5 August, the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, who regrets he cannot be here today, made exactly the same point in a letter to the Times, based on his former experience as the clerk to the Commons. On 14 July, right towards the end of the Session, when the Commons got to Report, which it had been waiting for from November last year, it was allowed a four-hour debate. There were three Divisions during that debate on issues that the time allowed. Then at 6.10 pm, Hansard records:
“Proceedings interrupted (Programme Order, 3 November 2025).
The Deputy Speaker put forthwith the Questions necessary for the disposal of the business to be concluded at that time”.—[Official Report, Commons, 14/7/26; col. 872.]
What was that business after four hours? That programme Motion, forthwith, meant that 10 new clauses, six schedules and over 70 amendments went into this Bill on the nod. We are not talking about how the Commons did not have time to do the odd clause; 10 new clauses, six schedules and over 70 amendments were approved on the nod because of the guillotine Motion. Now it is over to us.
All I am saying is we should have a list. The buck stops with the Government; it is the Government, not the Members. It is quite simple to have, so that we know what has not been debated, because the incentive, therefore, down the other end is to demand more time on the Bills so that there is less work to come back to after we have done our job. I beg to move.
Lord Lemos (Lab)
My Lords, you are not quite done with me yet. This is quite an unusual Motion and, as I understand it, it is about not only this Bill but the general scrutiny of legislation in the House of Commons. The entirety of the Bill was considered in a Commons Public Bill Committee in the usual way and again by the whole House on Report. In the Commons, the selection of proposed amendments for debate and for decision is not a matter for the Government, but all selected amendments were debated in that House in that House’s usual way.
Both Houses work differently and they have their own procedures and practices. It is not for this House nor the Government to criticise those proceedings in the other place, as I am sure noble Lords would not want them to comment on the way we conduct our business. I hope, therefore, that the noble Lord feels able to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Rooker (Lab)
My noble friend was not listening to what I said. The Government do the programme Motion, not the Members. It is the Government who propose the guillotine. It is the government Motion that puts the dates down and the times allowed—the Government, not the Members. The Members agree it because it is on a three-line Whip, and the Government decide whether to make a long Motion with more time or a short one with less time. It is the Government who do it—and every Bill is covered, by the way. Look at Commons Hansard.
I am not criticising the Commons; we are not allowed to do that. The point is that the Members need to be strengthened against the Government. Do not forget that the Government are in charge of both Houses. The programme Motion still applies; when we have made our amendments to this Bill they will go back to the Commons to be delivered under the programme Motion. The Commons will have maybe an hour or 90 minutes to look at what we said, and there will be complaints such as, “Oh, it’s the Lords again. We need to reform them”. The Government Whips will be saying that to Labour Members who will be complaining about the work we are sending them.
It is about time we got a bit of candour, openness and transparency on this issue. It is true that I tabled this amendment before the end of July, and the Government saw the amendment and withdrew the Motion. That is why it has only just appeared. I was asked whether I would do it on another Bill; I said that I proposed to do it on every Bill, simply because it has got to that point, with the pressure on us and the deliberations in the other place about this place, because we are following the rules to do scrutiny, and do not have guillotines or programme Motions, and have to look at what we need to concentrate on. What we need to concentrate on is what the Commons have not been allowed to, because the Government have taken the time away for them to do the job properly.
At this time, I am tempted to divide the House, but I will not. I would ask the Minister to go and look at Commons Hansard and get better briefed. The Government have had at least five weeks’ warning of the amendment, because they saw it on the Order Paper, and the commitment Motion was withdrawn in late July. I have not done anything about it. The letter from the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, was complete news to me. He regrets that he cannot be here this evening; otherwise, he would be speaking in support. I am coming back on this, but I beg leave to withdraw.