The Lord Bishop of Manchester

My Lords, I declare my interest as co-chair of the ethics committee of the National Police Chiefs’ Council. I heartily welcome the Bill. I have spoken in this House on previous occasions regarding the need for a wide duty of candour. I am delighted that we are now making substantial progress. The role of public officials is and always must be one of stewardship, not dominance. To remain effective, this relationship demands the ongoing consent of the people, and that is possible only through honesty, transparency and the means for communities to get to the truth when things go wrong. This necessitates a higher standard of conduct for authorities which wield greater powers and capabilities. It requires resources to level the playing field when victims seek justice. This relationship is a fragile one, but it must be carefully maintained if public authorities are to retain the respect and trust of the people they serve. The introduction of a statutory duty of candour and transparency will be an important step towards strengthening this relationship and empowering the people to hold officials accountable when that trust is broken. As a young priest and industrial chaplain in Rotherham, I was deployed to the Hillsborough stadium when the clergy who had been present at the match were stood down. The sight of the thick, metal crush barriers at the Leppings Lane end, twisted out of shape by the sheer weight of human flesh and bone pressing down on them, still haunts me almost four decades on. The bereaved families I met at the stadium were desperate to know why their loved ones had perished. I could listen to their concerns, I could—and did—offer my pastoral support, but I had no answers to their questions as to how the tragedy could have happened. In contrast to the welcome my colleagues and I received at the stadium, a few days later when I offered my services at the local police station, knowing that many officers would have been present and traumatised, I was told bluntly that outsiders were not welcome. That itself told a story. Almost immediately, and for years to come, supporters were blamed for the tragedy, accused of drunkenness and of arriving intentionally late and without tickets. It was against this backdrop of deflected blame that the families of the victims bore responsibility to campaign for the truth of what happened that day—a process that took them many decades and came at enormous emotional and financial cost. The vulnerable and grieving should never carry the weight of securing accountability on their own; nor should the burden of proof fall on the bereaved at a time of such great loss. In this House and far beyond, we all owe a great debt of gratitude to my right reverend friend, Bishop James Jones, a former Member of this House, who has already been mentioned. He worked long and hard, including facing down severe political pressure, to complete and present his report on Hillsborough. It nearly did not happen; he was nearly stopped. Drawing on his conclusions, I strongly support the commitment to assign additional public expenditure to legal aid for bereaved family members, ensuring equal and fair participation in the course of justice. In my own diocese in my time as Bishop, we have witnessed another profound tragedy: the Manchester Arena attack. The circumstances were very different, but it demonstrated the same important principle: bereaved families, and those injured and maimed physically and psychologically, deserve access to the truth, and transparency and accountability are essential for victims to seek true justice. In Manchester, after an initial locally commissioned inquiry had been substantially thwarted by a failure of candour, a second statutory inquiry was established. It examined security failures, emergency response shortcomings and lessons for the future. Families were active participants in the inquiry. Many of the lessons it established were drawn directly from their experiences. Nothing can erase the suffering that the victims and their families experienced that day and in the years that have followed, but I believe that we eventually reached a point where the protection of the public, and the needs of the bereaved and injured, were no longer consistently left playing second fiddle to the reputation of public authorities. I hope that the introduction of a legal duty to assist in such investigations may enable victims and families to get real answers that they can trust and to get them much more quickly than in the past. By a quirk of history, before my time in Rotherham, I served close to the Orgreave coking plant during the 1985-86 miners’ strike, and many of the miners were my parishioners. That incident pre-dates Hillsborough, but it has taken until the past few months for a much-needed inquiry to be set up. My right reverend friend the Bishop of Sheffield, who is unable to be in his place today, is chairing that inquiry. I pray—and I mean that—that, even before this Bill is enacted, all those who are called to give evidence before him will operate within the spirit of candour for which it seeks to make statutory provision. As the Bill moves forward, there are a couple of matters of detail that I will seek to follow. First, I am keen to see how we properly protect public sector whistleblowers. All too often, those who first draw attention to wrongdoing pay a heavy personal price and their careers are wrecked. Secondly, I hope we can maintain the application of the duty of candour to private sector bodies that are contracted to provide services on behalf of a public body all the way down the sometimes lengthy subcontracting chain. The duty must not be amended in your Lordships’ House in ways that would incentivise the outsourcing of functions in order to get round the Bill’s aims and purposes. In times of great tragedy, communities are held together through trust, dignity and mutual care. We found that in Manchester in 2017. We all—public officers and citizens alike—have a responsibility to care for one another, to seek out justice and to rebuild. When authority figures are not held properly accountable, and denial and defensiveness are enabled, our communities are further fragmented. The mutual respect that binds our communities can be maintained only through transparency, accountability and ongoing public scrutiny. The Bill will go a long way towards strengthening the principles of moral leadership and trust that empower our public officers to serve the people effectively. Once we have given it our thorough consideration—as we must—I pray that it will be enacted, and all its provisions commenced, as swiftly as possible.