On the 15th April 1989, in Sheffield’s Hillsborough stadium, 97 people were unlawfully killed in a fatal stadium crush at the Liverpool and Nottingham Forest football match. Today the legacy of the 97 hopes to be recognised in a watershed law that will protect others from state failures.
The Public Office (Accountability) Bill, otherwise known as Hillsborough Law, seeks to create a statutory duty of candour and assistance for public authorities and officials involved in inquiries, inquests and similar investigations.
It aims to establish a framework ensuring ethical conduct and mandatory codes of practice for public bodies, while classifying failures to uphold this duty, or attempts to mislead the public, as criminal offences.
The bill would also replace the common law offence of misconduct in public office with two new statutory offences and introduce a right to parity of representation for bereaved families at inquests involving public authorities.
Hillsborough Law is the result of long and hard campaigns for legislation that will bring transparency and truthfulness from public officials to prevent future cover-ups and state failure that the Hillsborough victims and families endured. It aims to provide a guarantee from the government that false narratives won’t be able to taint our memory of history again.
The bill has been a long time coming since the Hillsborough Independent Panel produced a report in 2012, 3 years after the panel was announced, that expressed concerns about the widespread blaming of the behaviour of Liverpool fans for the disaster.
Inquests followed this finding and in 2016 the disaster was finally recognised as an unlawful killing in which the fans had no responsibility for causing. The verdict was met with celebration with campaigners singing outside the court. It is the aspect of accountability, and subsequent justice, that was missing from this result, that the law aims to provide.
This is not just for those who have suffered from the Hillsborough disaster but from other British state failures, including victims of infected blood, Windrush and Grenfell Tower.
The Labour party’s 2024 manifesto promised a commitment to face “historical injustices” with a specific intention to implement Hillsborough law and to enforce its provision of legal aid for victims. This aims to bring fairness by denying the use of unjustifiably large legal teams. It is the largest expansion of legal aid in a decade with costs being covered by the public body represented.
The specifics of the law are still being decided upon but it has been acknowledged by the government that further delay will simply compound and prolong the families’ fight to ensure nothing similar to Hillsborough will happen again. Liberal Democrats are pushing for the duty of candour to involve social media companies and to strengthen whistleblowing protections, which include an independent office for the whistleblower.
It is currently unclear how the Hillsborough Law will impact the University of Glasgow’s Freedom of Information policies.
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