Families’ 37-year Battle wins law state weakens
MPs passed the Hillsborough law duty of candour while MI5, Grenfell and spycops cover-ups carry on, and its own carve-outs show the fight isn't over.
Charlotte Hennessy was six years old when her father James was crushed to death at Hillsborough in 1989. On Monday she stood outside Parliament as MPs passed the bill named after that disaster, the Hillsborough law duty of candour, and said the new legal aid it brings will stop families like hers having to “fundraise and use savings for legal representation” while burying their dead.
That is the real story of this week’s vote. Not the choreography at Westminster, but the fact that it took bereaved families 37 years to force a law obliging the state to tell them the truth, and that the state they forced it from is, right now, still fighting to keep the truth from other families.
Hillsborough law duty of candour: what the bill actually does The Public Office (Accountability) Bill passed its Commons third reading on 14 July. It creates a duty of candour on public authorities and officials in dealings with inquiries and inquests, backed by criminal sanctions for serious breaches, and a new offence of intentionally or recklessly misleading the public. It comes with a £185m expansion of non-means-tested legal aid for bereaved families at inquests, the largest such expansion in a decade.
This is not a hollow gesture. Pete Weatherby KC, who helped draft the law, says the government backed off its attempt to carve intelligence agencies out of the duty altogether. Margaret Aspinall, who lost her 18-year-old son James at Hillsborough, and fellow campaigners Charlotte Hennessy, Sue Roberts and Steve Kelly put it plainly in a joint statement: “We have shown that true power belongs to ordinary people. We did not stay silent, we were not ground down, we were not afraid to speak truth to power.” That is a win, and it is theirs, not the ministers now shaking hands over it.
The carve-outs still standing
But the bill that passed is not the bill campaigners wanted. MI5 and MI6 chiefs can apply to an inquiry chair to withhold information on national security grounds. Both Houses of Parliament are excluded from the new offence of misleading the public entirely, on the government’s argument that MPs and peers “do not make decisions on behalf of the state,” a claim Labour’s own Justin Madders and the Green peer Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb challenged in debate. The duty applies only to firms with a direct public contract, so subcontractors down the outsourcing chain sit outside it. None of these are accidents. They are the state writing its own exemptions into the law meant to stop it lying.
To be fair to the government’s critics on the other side: the shadow justice secretary, Nick Timothy, called the final bill a “shambles” and said ministers had “watered down” protections for MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. That complaint runs the opposite direction to ours. Timothy wanted the security services shielded further. The families’ campaign wanted them exposed further. The gap between those two positions is exactly where the fight over this law’s meaning will actually happen, in the Lords and in implementation, not in Monday’s vote.
The cover-ups did not stop for the vote
While MPs were toasting a rewiring of the state, the mechanisms this law targets were still running.
The government held the first superinjunction ever granted against it for 683 days, gagging reporting of a 2022 leak that put the personal data of more than 18,700 Afghans who had worked with British forces into the open, and gagging reporting of the injunction’s own existence. Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee was kept in the dark. The Speaker was told to keep MPs quiet. It was lifted a year ago. Around 1,000 of those Afghans have expressed interest in suing the Ministry of Defence over what was done to them.
Families of the 22 people killed at Manchester Arena in 2017 say MI5 “can’t be trusted to tell the truth” after the public inquiry found the Security Service did not give an “accurate picture” of the intelligence it held on bomber Salman Abedi, and that there was a “realistic possibility” the attack could have been stopped. More than 250 survivors are now suing MI5.
Nine years after 72 people died in the Grenfell Tower fire, the Metropolitan Police still says there is “no presumption” of charges; files go to the Crown Prosecution Service by the end of September, with any trial unlikely before 2029. Documents on the 1984 Battle of Orgreave, where miners say police statements were dictated to junior officers to build a false case, remain embargoed in the National Archives until 2066. The Undercover Policing Inquiry has spent nine years and more than £82m, much of it on the police’s own applications for secrecy, while women deceived into relationships by undercover officers and the families of children whose identities were stolen by the state are still waiting for full disclosure.
Whose law is this
Keir Starmer, in his last week as prime minister before Andy Burnham takes over on 20 July, told the Commons “there is a class element to this… the cry for justice was ignored… because they’re working class, because they’re black, because they’re women and girls.” He is right. But the institutions still running gagging orders, still contesting disclosure at three separate public inquiries, and still nine years from a single Grenfell charge report to him and to the government he is leaving behind, not to the police officers of 1989.
The Hillsborough law is a floor forced into existence by people the state spent decades lying to. Whether it becomes anything more than that depends on what happens after the cameras leave the Commons, in the Lords, in the small print of an MI5 withholding process nobody has yet had to use, and in whether Grenfell, Orgreave, spycops and the families of Manchester Arena get the truth this law promises them, or the exemptions it also promises the state.
