The Hillsborough Law Starts Too Late

The Public Office (Accountability) Bill, the one everybody calls the Hillsborough Law, is in the House of Lords. Second reading was on 1 September and committee sittings are scheduled for 12, 19 and 21 October. It’s a good bill, and the families who spent years getting it this far deserve every clause. Read it from where a bereaved family stands on the day of a disaster, though, and something is missing. The candour duty, the assistance, the legal aid: each starts when an inquiry, an inquest or an investigation starts. The offence of misleading the public would punish a day-one lie, but years later and after the fact. The families’ clock starts on the day.

What the Bill does

The Bill puts a statutory duty of candour and assistance on public authorities and public officials in their dealings with inquiries and investigations. It creates criminal offences for serious breaches of that duty and for misleading the public, and it gives bereaved families non-means-tested legal aid at inquests where a public authority is an interested person and represented. Clause 4 extends the candour duty to some private bodies: those with a health and safety responsibility towards the people affected, and those under a direct contract with a public authority to provide services connected with the incident, where their activities significantly affected the public. The Lords Library briefing sets out the detail, and the Commons Library briefing records how it got through the Commons.

All of that lives in the room where the truth is eventually established. The argument I put to a room of claimant group-litigation lawyers at CORLA this week (the talk is here) is that the truth is contested long before that room opens, and the Bill should say something about the first three days.

The first three days, in the record

On the afternoon of 15 April 1989, with the disaster still unfolding, the Hillsborough match commander told senior football officials that fans had forced a gate. The Hillsborough Independent Panel called that account ‘a falsehood’ and noted that it ‘was broadcast internationally and was the first explanation of the cause of the disaster to enter the public domain’ (summary, paragraph 140). Four days later the Sun ran ‘The Truth’. The news agency behind the story later told the Evening Standard that the allegations had been made ‘unsolicited, by ranking officers in the South Yorkshire force to three different experienced senior journalists’ (IOPC and Operation Resolve report, December 2025, paragraph 7.86). On the morning that front page appeared, the secretary of the South Yorkshire Police Federation told a meeting that ‘putting our side of the story over to the press and media’ had been his priority (Panel, paragraph 148).

The IOPC found no evidence that the briefing was organised or directed by senior officers (paragraph 7.109), and I’m careful to say so. It didn’t need to be organised. Several officers spoke, a Federation official made it his priority, and the version was in print four days after the disaster, while families were still arranging funerals. South Yorkshire Police went on to amend 327 of its own officers’ accounts, almost one in four, many with whole paragraphs removed or rewritten (IOPC executive summary, paragraph 91). Within four months Lord Justice Taylor found that the main cause was ‘the failure of police control’ and that not a single witness had been called to support the allegations. The inquests took 27 years.

Aberfan is the older version. On 21 October 1966 a coal tip engulfed a village school and killed 144 people, 116 of them children. One month later the Sunday Mirror’s front page of 20 November branded the village with ‘quarrels and greed’ over the disaster fund. The Tribunal put the blame on the National Coal Board within ten months, and its chairman admitted the board had been at fault (the government’s own summary); the row over money stayed part of the village’s story anyway.

Grenfell is the corporate version. Twelve days after the fire the maker of the cladding panels issued a statement: ‘Our product is one component in the overall cladding system; we don’t control the overall system or its compliance.’ True, as far as it went. Seven years later the Phase 2 report found ‘systematic dishonesty’ among the firms that made and sold the panels and insulation (volume 1, paragraph 2.19), and that this company had pursued a deliberate strategy to keep selling its product on a statement about its fire performance ‘that it knew to be false’ (paragraph 2.25).

Two of the worst scandals of the period had no day one at all. The Infected Blood Inquiry found that the department’s ‘no conclusive proof’ line on whether AIDS could be transmitted in blood or blood products, which a health minister used in a press release on 1 September 1983, was ‘technically correct’ but ‘indefensible’, and that it ‘gave false reassurance’ (volume 1, pages 58 to 59). The department’s own briefing note that May had said the evidence was ‘suggestive that this is likely to be the case’. At the Post Office, the communications director’s own emails, read back to him at the inquiry on 14 May 2024, record that the 2013 strategy was to ‘contain coverage’ of Second Sight’s interim report on Horizon bugs, that the news cycle ‘lasted little over 12 hours’, which he called ‘highly satisfactory’, and his advice to the chief executive that, ‘without a final report’, an apology to subpostmasters ‘would not be the right course of action’. The inquiry has not yet published its findings on communications; those are his words, not its.

The pattern isn’t a conspiracy, and it doesn’t need to be. In four of the five, the institution with the most to lose spoke first, usually inside 48 hours, and what it said left out facts it already held. At Aberfan a newspaper did the job for it. The correction arrives years later, through a different channel, at a fraction of the volume. That is the ground the families’ lawyers inherit.

What arrives now, and when

The UK has built a good deal since 1989. Almost all of it arrives late, or belongs to someone other than the families. Police family liaison officers are there within hours, but they work for the force, which at Hillsborough was the institution under scrutiny. Councils run humanitarian assistance centres. IPSO’s guidance on major incidents tells journalists not to be the ones breaking news of a death to a family and to distinguish between claims and fact; it offers a privacy notice to editors and a harassment helpline, and both wait for someone to ask. When Survivors Against Terror surveyed 116 survivors and bereaved relatives of terror attacks in 2021, 59 per cent reported media intrusion and 48 per cent of it came within 24 hours. Their request for a voluntary 48-hour pause before contacting the bereaved was not taken up; IPSO said journalists must remain free to report in the public interest, and the founder of the Ethical Journalism Network called a ban ‘impossible to impose and very worrying for press freedom’.

Then there is the Independent Public Advocate, created by Part 2 of the Victims and Prisoners Act 2024. Cindy Butts took up the post in September 2025 and was sent to Manchester after the Heaton Park synagogue attack, four working days into the job. Her first annual report is honest about what that was like, and its conclusion is the right one: independent advocacy ‘cannot be improvised in the midst of crisis’.

The problem is the trigger. She can’t be deployed to a particular incident until the Justice Secretary declares a major incident in writing (section 34) and then chooses to appoint her to it (section 36). The state decides when independent help for the families begins, and at Hillsborough and with infected blood the state was the institution under scrutiny. She has no power to compel disclosure, nobody has an enforceable right to her support (section 39), and the Act doesn’t mention the media.

What the Bill should say about the first three days

The Lords is the right place to fix this. Amendments can be tabled at committee in October and again at report stage, and if peers amend the Bill it goes back to the Commons. Here is what I’d want the families’ lawyers, INQUEST and the campaign groups to put in front of them.

Deploy the Advocate on the emergency services’ own declaration. The JESIP joint doctrine already says first responders should be empowered to declare a major incident for their organisation at the scene. Where people have died, that operational declaration should deploy the Advocate automatically, with the ministerial declaration confirming it rather than gating it. Lord Wills’s original Public Advocate Bill would have had the advocate act at the families’ request; you can’t ask dozens of grieving strangers to organise a request inside 72 hours, and you shouldn’t ask a minister whose department may be in the frame.

Widen the duty of candour, in two directions. First, so that it plainly reaches a manufacturer that sold a product into the chain on a safety claim it knew to be false. Under clause 4 as drafted that is arguable at best. It shouldn’t be arguable. Second, so that candour is owed to the families and not only to the inquiry. Infected blood and the Post Office came to light over years; there was no scene and no declaration. The moment an institution learns its public account is wrong, the families should be told, and a failure to tell them should engage the same duty and the same offence.

Write down that the families are told first. Air crash law already does this. In the United States the National Transportation Safety Board must, so far as practicable, brief passenger families ‘prior to any public briefing’ on the accident, its causes and any other findings (49 USC 1136(e)(1)). Here, retained Regulation 996/2010 requires the investigating authority, before it makes public its factual observations, preliminary reports or conclusions, to forward them to the victims and their relatives first, and Article 21 requires a national emergency plan covering assistance to victims and a designated ‘reference person’ as their point of contact. No law says any of that for a football ground, a tower block, a ferry or a Post Office counter. One clause would.

Give the families a record from day one. Those responsible start theirs on the day: every statement, every briefing, every line to take. The Hillsborough families waited 23 years for a Panel with the power to disclose. Give the Advocate a duty, from deployment, to keep a log of who said what to whom and when, and a power to obtain the documents behind the first public statements. The Bill’s candour duty already assumes those documents exist. The question is who sees them, and when.

Have the press regulator act without being asked. On a declaration, IPSO’s privacy notice should go to editors by default and the broadcasting codes should be invoked the same day, with a named contact for the families so that journalists have somewhere legitimate to go. Survivors Against Terror asked for a pause in 2021 and were told a ban would threaten press freedom. A notice that already exists, sent a day earlier, threatens nothing.

Bring the legal aid forward. The Bill’s parity of representation is for inquests where a public authority is an interested person. It should bite from the first inquest opening and the first contact from the coroner, not from the resumed hearing months later. The first hearing is often the first time a family hears the institution’s version read out in a court.

Who carries it

None of this needs a law firm to step forward on the day. Solicitors can’t make unsolicited approaches to the public to offer their services (SRA Code of Conduct, paragraph 8.9), and nor should they. It needs the bodies that already speak for families collectively: INQUEST, Disaster Action, the Advocate’s own office, and the claimant associations whose members will inherit whatever story is written in those three days. CORLA’s member firms compete with each other for the litigation. They don’t compete over whether the families are told first.

The Bill’s title is a promise: accountability for public office. Accountability arrives at the inquiry. The families need something earlier than that, and cheaper. A voice, someone between them and the letterbox, a record of their own, and one written rule about who is told first. Committee stage opens on 12 October. That is the moment to put the first three days into the Bill.