The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Lemos) (Lab)

My Lords, I hope all noble Lords had a good break over the summer. As your Lordships might perhaps have noticed, we have been beavering away at the Ministry of Justice. If you get a call from No. 10, as I did on the last day before Recess, be careful what you wish for. I thank the many noble Lords who interrupted their summers to meet me; I appreciate their time and commitment enormously. It is a privilege to open the debate on this Bill. It is a long-overdue piece of legislation, one that will deliver one of the biggest constitutional changes in the relationship between the public and the state for generations. We should not underestimate its importance or the impact it could have. I start, as I should, by paying tribute to those who have fought to get us here. The Hillsborough families experienced the most awful injustice. The state turned on them exactly when it should have been on their side. They never gave up on the truth and, ultimately, getting the justice they deserved. They insisted that no one should ever have to go through what they went through. It is their courage and determination that have brought us to your Lordships’ House today with this legislation in front of us. I also pay tribute to Members of your Lordships’ House for their determined and courageous work over many years—indeed, decades. Many Peers here today have stood by the families and supported them. Please forgive me: I do not have time to mention everyone as time is short. I am also mindful that it is not just the Hillsborough families whose work has brought us to this point. There has been a coalition of families and campaign groups who have fought for the truth, and I thank all of them on behalf of the Government for the Bill being debated today. I am pleased to note that some of them are in the Public Gallery today and many others will be watching our proceedings, and I am sure that all speakers in this debate will keep that in mind. I warmly welcome them to your Lordships’ House today. We have seen time and again why the Bill is so vital. The Post Office Horizon scandal, infected blood, Grenfell and, most recently, the shocking Nottingham maternity scandal all involved a lack of candour and efforts to conceal the truth. In some cases, attempts were even made to create false narratives against the victims. As well as these well-known examples, we must also bear in mind the many individual cases where the state has not just failed in its duty but actively worked against the people it has wronged. That is disgraceful. The public should be able to expect that our public institutions will do everything reasonably possible to prevent serious failures happening. They should also be able to expect that, when something does go wrong, those institutions will tell the truth and—this is a key point to which we will return in the debate—tell the truth quickly. That requires more than candour when someone is called to an inquiry, inquest or investigation. Public servants must know that, when something has gone wrong, there is an obligation to come forward and say so. They should be able to do so without fear of professional consequences, and it should be clear what is required of them. If they believe there is wrongdoing or behaviour that falls below what is expected, there should be routes for them to report that. The aim of the Bill—I stress this point—is to change the culture of public bodies once and for all. No family should have to fight for the truth about what happened to their loved ones, no family should face a profound disparity in legal representation and no public official should be in fear that they will be asked to lie, conceal the truth or stay silent. That is our intention for the Bill. I will set out the measures in the Bill, starting with the two duties of candour that it creates. The first is a statutory duty of candour and assistance, requiring all public servants and officials to come forward proactively, as I have said, and act with candour, transparency and frankness in all inquiries and investigations seeking to establish the truth. Failure to comply, with the intention of impeding the investigation, or being reckless in doing so, will be a criminal offence punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment. The duty will apply to statutory and non-statutory inquiries, coroners’ investigations and inquiries called by local authorities, with a power for Ministers to extend it to other types of investigation through secondary legislation. While principally focused on the public sector, it will also apply to private sector bodies such as those delivering public functions, those with health and safety responsibilities and relevant public sector contractors. These measures will apply across the United Kingdom and I thank the devolved Governments for their close work with officials in the Ministry of Justice and the Cabinet Office. I know there has been particular interest in how the duty will apply to the intelligence services. The Government have always been clear that the intelligence services are within scope, but we have listened to concerns about the application of the duty to individuals and the handling of sensitive information. Amendments made in the other place ensure that the duty applies fully to all current and former intelligence services personnel, while using established procedures to protect national security information. What this means in practice is that, where an individual employee of a national security body receives a request under the duty for protected information, they must pass that information to the head of the relevant authority, rather than directly to the inquiry or investigation. The head of the authority is then responsible for providing that information, subject to existing legal and practical safeguards on disclosure. Where necessary, restrictions on disclosure can be sought through existing legal routes including, in exceptional cases, converting proceedings into a secure statutory inquiry. The amendments also make it clear that responsibility for notifying an inquiry, inquest or investigation about sensitive material rests with the national security body to which that information belongs. Where another public authority holds a copy, it must inform the relevant national security body, allowing that body to assess the material in its wider context and ensure that the appropriate safeguards are applied. This means that the duty applies in full to the intelligence services, while providing confidence to the public and our international partners that sensitive national security information will continue to be protected. I particularly thank the chair and members of the Intelligence and Security Committee for their constructive work with the Government in reaching this clear and balanced position. This Bill also establishes a legal duty for public authorities to promote and maintain high standards of ethical conduct, including having a code containing a professional duty of candour for all public servants. These codes will be rooted in the seven Nolan principles and must set out clear expectations for conduct, consequences for breaching them and routes for reporting misconduct, making protected disclosures and raising complaints. Public authorities will, in turn, have a duty to promote and maintain high standards of ethical conduct among their employees. This is a cornerstone of the Government’s approach. While codifying good practice is important, the purpose here is to go further: it is prevention. We want to create a culture in which wrongdoing is identified and confronted early, before institutional defensiveness takes hold and failures are compounded by attempts to conceal them. Hillsborough demonstrated the terrible consequences when public servants deliberately mislead the public and the media in order to spread a false narrative. The families were denied the truth and that injustice persisted for decades. This law should provide a powerful deterrent against such conduct ever happening again. This Bill therefore creates a new offence of misleading the public. It will apply where a public authority or official intends to mislead the public, or is reckless as to that possibility, and knows or ought to know that their conduct is seriously improper. That is a deliberately high threshold. The conduct must involve significant or repeated dishonesty on matters of significant concern to the public. The act must cause or risk causing harm—whether economic, physical or psychological—and must represent a significant departure from what would have been expected of that person in carrying out their functions. These safeguards ensure that minor or inconsequential matters are not criminalised. Likewise, legitimate activity such as undercover policing will not be affected. The offence is targeted at serious misconduct of the kind we witnessed at Hillsborough. Those convicted will face up to two years in prison and an unlimited fine. The Bill also replaces the common-law offence of misconduct in public office with two new statutory offences: seriously improper acts and breach of the duty to prevent death or serious injury. This will bring greater clarity to the law, defining who is covered, the conduct that is captured and the consequences of abusing public office. It will ensure that officials who abuse their position or fall short of the behaviour expected of those in public office will continue to face serious consequences, including up to 10 years in prison for the offence of seriously improper acts and up to 14 years for breach of duty to prevent death or serious injury. Let me turn to the Bill’s measures in respect of legal aid. Too many bereaved families go to inquests seeking answers about the death of a loved one, only to find themselves facing the full weight of the state. Public bodies arrive with experienced lawyers, while families without access to publicly funded support are left to represent themselves, meet the costs personally or turn to crowdfunding. This is a massive and indefensible asymmetry. This Bill will address that profound imbalance. It will ensure greater parity by providing bereaved families with access to help and advocacy, regardless of their financial circumstances, while removing burdensome bureaucracy at one of the most difficult moments of their lives. The cost will, rightly, fall to the relevant public authorities, or their responsible government departments, where they are interested persons at an inquest. The Bill will place a duty on them to consider whether their own legal representation is necessary and proportionate, taking account of the support available to families and their obligations to support the investigation and establish the facts of what happened; but effective participation is about more than representation. The experience of families in this situation has informed our approach, and the Bill will require guidance setting clear principles for how public authorities should participate in inquests. It will also empower coroners and inquiry chairs to raise concerns about the conduct of public authorities or their legal representatives at an inquiry or inquest. The principle is simple: an inquest or inquiry is not a contest to be won. Those representing the state should approach it not as adversaries but with sensitivity and respect, and with the proper purpose of helping to establish the truth, learn lessons and provide bereaved families with the answers they deserve. The measures I have set out today are substantial but the principles behind them are simple: first, that we should create a culture in our public institutions that prevents failures happening in the first place; and, secondly, that where something does go wrong, the truth must come out—fully, candidly and without delay, because delay has a cost. Every year spent fighting for answers is another year in which families live with uncertainty, their grief prolonged by unanswered questions. Difficult truths are always painful, but concealing them, or allowing them to emerge only after years of struggle, prolongs and significantly compounds that pain. This House brings formidable experience to the issues addressed by the Bill, and I know noble Lords will want to scrutinise it closely. I can say on behalf of the Government that we will approach that scrutiny constructively. I look forward to hearing contributions from across the House today and to working closely with noble Lords as the Bill proceeds to the later stages. We cannot undo the injustices that brought us here, or the pain and anguish endured by those who, through no fault of their own, were forced to fight for the truth, but we can learn from all this. We can seek to prevent the failures of the past happening again. We can ensure that when public institutions do fail, the instinct of the state is not to close ranks or to wait to be challenged but to come forward, tell the truth, account for what went wrong and put it right. I beg to move.