Public Office (Accountability) Bill

Lord Wills Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 1st September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wills (Lab)]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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