Public Office (Accountability) Bill

Emma Lewell Excerpts

Report stage & 3rd reading
Tuesday 14th July 2026 Commons Chamber

The Hillsborough families have walked an unimaginably long road. They have carried the weight of grief, while shouldering the burden of securing justice for generations that follow. Their courage has changed the country for the better, and today, in this place, it is our turn to finally walk alongside them. We honour the memory of the 97 not only by remembering them, but by ensuring that no family is ever left to fight alone again. That is the promise of the Hillsborough law. That is the promise of a true duty of candour. That is how we ensure that the words “you’ll never walk alone” are no longer simply an anthem of remembrance, but a lasting commitment from this Parliament to every family who seek nothing more than the truth.

[Emma Lewell (South Shields) (Lab)]

Before I speak to the Government’s new clauses and amendments, which ensure that there is no carve-out from the duty of candour for the intelligence and security services, I put on record my utmost respect for my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool West Derby (Ian Byrne) and all my hon. and right hon. Friends who have been relentless in pushing this Bill forward. However, it is the Hillsborough families and campaigners, who have fought doggedly through their pain and heartache, who deserve all our respect. In memory of their loved ones, through their courage and refusal to be silenced or ground down, they have fundamentally changed the relationship between the state and the public, ensuring the services that are there to protect and serve us are always accountable.

There is something deeply wrong in our country that caused us to need to legislate for these services to tell the truth, and to face criminal sanctions if they do not. Telling the truth should have always been their position, not something that they were forced to do. The rest of us face reprisals for not telling the truth. At the very least, we should expect that from the state.

Chloe and Liam, the children of my dear friends and constituents, Lisa and Mark Rutherford and Caroline Curry, were killed in the Manchester terror attack. They sat through utterly agonising years, months, days and hours of inquiry hearings, which revealed that MI5 had not given an accurate picture of the key intelligence held on their children’s murderer. The chairman of the public inquiry also found that MI5 missed a significant opportunity to take action that might have prevented the attack. Lisa, Mark and Caroline were signatories to the Hillsborough Law Now campaign letter to my right hon. and learned Friend the Prime Minister earlier this year. That letter says:

“Despite MI5 lying to a public inquiry in this way, no one has been held to account. This lack of accountability needs to change. Creating a full duty of candour responsibility on MI5, MI6 and GCHQ is the clearest route to creating this change.”

The letter went on to say:

“Every security and intelligence officer should be required to tell the truth, and the leaders of the organisations should also bear full responsibility.”

That is absolutely right, and I am relieved today that the Government have listened.

Caroline, Lisa and Mark are not in the Gallery today. They told me that they feel that by not being here, they are letting their children down. They are not. Their loved ones will know that they, like everyone who has fought so hard and has been involved in getting us here today, have never, ever given up. They have fought with every breath, every single minute of every day since their loved ones were so brutally taken from them. This law will not be retrospective; it cannot right past wrongs. However, it will send a very clear signal to the state, and in doing so will instil a culture in which the truth, not the cover-up, is the primary focus. This is so important for everyone who is fighting for justice—the nuclear veterans, Chinook, Grenfell, the Post Office scandal, the infected blood scandal, the covid-19 bereaved families, and many others.

As MPs in this place, it is now our job to make sure that this Bill becomes an Act, to make sure that every single word of it is fully adhered to, and that the people we represent are never again treated in such a despicable way. In a democracy like ours, truth and justice should never have taken decades; it should never have been this hard, this relentless or this painful. It is a real honour to have met all those involved with the Hillsborough law campaign, although I wish I had met them under different circumstances. I thank all of them. We all owe them, and I sincerely hope that now they have got Parliament to this stage, they are able to find some small element of peace.

[Sarah Russell]

I join my many colleagues in paying tribute to the Hillsborough families—those in the Gallery today, and those who, for very understandable reasons, felt that they could not be here. Your quest for justice is truly inspirational to all of us, and I thank you so very much for your perseverance and everything you have done. I do not doubt that it will make the country a better place.

Many people have raised concerns about the duty of candour in this legislation, and its application to the security services. I am sure that when the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) raised this issue in the Chamber, he did so in good faith, but no one who has raised those concerns has been able to point to any case in which the existing law protecting the security services and the secret information that they hold has actually failed, or to any problems resulting from the existing arrangements. Those concerns seem to be entirely hypothetical. Giving the security services a huge carve-out from the duty of candour when there were known problems with, for example, the evidence given to the inquiry on the Manchester Arena bombing seems completely unsustainable and unreasonable. There is literally no evidence to suggest that this Bill presents any risk to national security. I join my colleagues in saying that if there were evidence to suggest that the existing arrangements had ever failed us, many of us would think again about the drafting of this Bill, as it has been presented by the Government. We would all put the country first, but I cannot see anything that should prevent this law from going ahead as drafted.

It is so important to get to the truth, and I hope that the duty of candour will help to move things forward significantly. We owe it to the Hillsborough families, and the many families affected by the many other disasters that we sadly hear about too often in this place, to ask the other question: what comes next? That is why I rise to speak in support of new clauses 5 and 6, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter), through which he calls for a national oversight mechanism that follows up on the actions taken by public authorities in response to the conclusions and recommendations of inquests and inquiries. We must get to the truth, and we must have recommendations on how to avoid future catastrophes, disasters and unnecessary risk, but we then have to do something to stop those things happening again.

At the moment, prevention of future death reports and inquiry reports are all too often not followed up—or not followed up consistently across the board. All too often, including after the Ockenden report and the maternity scandals, systemic change has not followed from inquiry recommendations, despite the considerable resources and effort put in by individuals to improve systems. We think about justice for the Hillsborough families, the Grenfell families and many other families who have sadly lost loved ones in terrible circumstances, but we must make sure that we bring into play the mechanisms that ensure proper follow-up after all these disasters. We must follow through on inquiry outcomes, and ensure that the right mechanisms are in place.

I thank very much everyone who has worked to get us to where we are today—the many families, but also the Members of Parliament who have worked across party and for a great deal of time on bringing this legislation forward. Let us keep this work going.