Public Office (Accountability) Bill

Sarah Russell Excerpts

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

[Catherine Atkinson]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for the time she has spent with me in raising this and other issues. Under our proposed expansion, multiple family members will be able to receive non-means-tested legal help to prepare for an inquest hearing where a public authority is an interested person, and that includes help with preparing documents to send to the inquest. Increasing the number of legal representatives when it comes to advocacy is an area of some concern. Inquests are fact-finding proceedings designed to determine the circumstances of a death, and we would hope that, in general, one legally aided advocate would be sufficient to support each family through an inquest hearing. However, we have heard her concerns, and I hope for her assistance in continuing to look at the issue as the Bill progresses. [Interruption.]

[Sarah Russell (Congleton) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Catherine Atkinson]

I will—my hon. Friend assists me in finding my place in my notes again, so I thank her.

[Sarah Russell]

My hon. Friend is most welcome. I am grateful for all the amendments that the Government have tabled, but I remain concerned that the current civil legal aid rate is £40 an hour. She has referred to security-vetted counsel. Is it likely that security-vetted counsel will be prepared to work for £40 an hour, when those of us who have done legal aid work know that, frankly, half the work that we do is unremunerated?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. Before the Minister responds, I just point out that many colleagues wish to contribute to the debate, so I hope she is coming to her conclusion soon.

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[Nick Timothy]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. The Prime Minister said this was going to be one of his first acts as Prime Minister; it turns out it is going to be his final act as Prime Minister. He is only doing it by the skin of his teeth, because he is presenting a proposal to the House that none of us got to see even this weekend, and those who had been drawn into the consultation process and had been privately consulted say that this bears no relation at all to what they have been shown, even very recently. The Government are clearly doing this on the hoof, and it is very worrying.

It is no exaggeration to say that some of those people who may be appointed to lead investigations and inquiries might be influenced or pressured by those whose purpose is the destruction of the British state and British sovereignty itself.

[Sarah Russell (Congleton) (Lab)]

The people who lead these inquiries are leading public figures and have usually held significant judicial office. Is the hon. Member honestly suggesting that they are going to be successfully pressured by people who want to destroy the British state?

[Nick Timothy]

I am tempted to say that the hon. Lady should have a conversation with the Attorney General, who used to prosecute British soldiers and was still appointed to one of the highest offices in the land.

Irish republicans, Islamist extremists, useful idiots deployed by Putin’s Russia—they will all see the opportunity in this law, as we know they have seen the opportunity in examples of lawfare fought elsewhere, including Northern Ireland. These are known unknowns, but there are also unknown unknowns. [Interruption.] There is an additional risk that the security services will be tied up in court cases, thanks to differing interpretations of the legislation, or that the scope of the Bill and the information that must be disclosed will be widened over time. I can hear sighs and complaints from Government Members, but they do not seem to understand that new laws—especially when they are to be taken in balance with existing laws—are tested in the courts, and their interpretation widens. That is a fact, and it is one of the concerns expressed by the intelligence agencies, the police and others. If Government Members think they are above listening to those people, I am very sorry about that.

There are questions, too, about the role of investigations and inquiries set up by the devolved Governments, including in Northern Ireland. I was alarmed by the Minister’s earlier answer to a question about the need to reveal information about intelligence agency sources in that context. These are the reasons that my party proposes an amendment, informed in part by the Government’s own proposed amendment back in January, to give control of secret material back to service leaders, who are rightly then accountable to elected Ministers, in not only the intelligence services but the armed forces, the National Crime Agency and counter-terrorism policing.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

[Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough and Thornaby East) (Lab)]

It is a true privilege to have been present for this debate, and to have heard some of the most incredible contributions that I have ever heard in this place.

I will be mercifully brief. I recognise that it is to the Prime Minister’s considerable credit that he has fulfilled his manifesto commitment and got the Bill to this point within a year of his remarks at the Labour party conference in Liverpool last year. I also put on record my recognition of my right hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) for his persistent work on this subject for many years. Principally, however, it is the families of Hillsborough victims, the Hillsborough Law Now campaign, Pete Weatherby KC, my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool West Derby (Ian Byrne) and many others who have to be recognised for not letting the matter rest, and for their tireless determination to get us to where we are today. We must not forget the Manchester Arena victims, the Grenfell families, the Chinook families, the contaminated blood families, the British nuclear test veterans, and all those who have been part of this campaign.

The duty of candour on the NHS did not deliver for the families of my constituents Christie Harnett, Nadia Sharif and Emily Moore, and many others who died in the scandal at the Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys mental health trust. I have welcomed confirmation of a public inquiry, and the information that applications have been received to chair it, but families need that inquiry to be up and running. I hope that the Health Secretary can progress that urgently this summer.

We are being asked to support dozens of Government amendments today that were tabled with little notice, and without our having been able to scrutinise them in detail, but I am led by the families to support those amendments. I recognise the calls for oversight and monitoring mechanisms, such as those set out in new clause 5, tabled by the Chair of the Justice Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter), and in new clause 1, by my old friend and doughty campaigner, my right hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool Garston (Maria Eagle). Those measures would assure us that the new Government amendments will function effectively and, among other things, allow us to hold to account police officers and members of the armed forces and the security services, as we are led to believe.

I sense that many Members across this House would like to hear more from our Front Benchers about commitments made to ensuring oversight and monitoring. Perhaps the Minister can address that when she responds to the debate. The expectation of honesty and transparency is not, and never can be, a threat to national security. Will the Minister set out how the application of the duty of candour and the prevention of carve-outs will be applied to the work of the Northern Ireland Legacy Commission, which is being established by the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill? Perhaps the Minister can confirm that the Government will table amendments to that Bill, or can otherwise provide guarantees that the measures in the Bill cover the families who have suffered so much in Northern Ireland.

The common characteristics of these appalling human tragedies are the most unimaginable trauma, pain and grief, and the demands are the same. They are for truth, justice and accountability, and today provides the means to deliver on those demands. I echo the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member from Liverpool, West Derby: if anything tells us why we come to this place to change the country for the better, surely it is what we are doing today, and I very much welcome this landmark legislation.