Lord Roe of West Wickham (Lab)

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for the opportunity to speak on this matter. I start by paying tribute to the victims of multiple tragedies that stretch from Hillsborough to Grenfell, who have given this country the chance to raise its head and feel good about itself in a law that is being passed that speaks to accountability, confidence in our democracy and the fact that we can open ourselves up and learn from incomparable disaster. I start with that, as this is utterly a positive. It is a tragedy—like the tragedies that have led to it—that it has taken so long, and the courage of the people who have suffered the most has brought us here. But, now that we are here, we should celebrate the fact that the UK is doing this. Regardless of the granular detail of the debate that will necessarily follow, or of the points that people who are more legally expert than me will make, the principle of this should not be underestimated. A country that is confident enough to do this is a country worth being proud of, and we should celebrate it in that context. If you look around the world, you see a distancing from this and a drawing away from this instinct. We should be pleased and proud, across all Benches, that it is coming here, even if we wish to debate the detail. My whole working life, from the shop floor to leading an organisation, was spent responding to the tragedies we are talking about today. I do not intend to list them, but some of them are the most significant losses of life this country has seen in the public space, both when I was in the military and in many years in the fire service in the years that followed. My experience in those spaces—as a firefighter, as a soldier and then leading an organisation that had the public duty to respond to disaster—was that disasters are, as noble Lords might expect, terrible places. Things will go wrong. They are going to go wrong. In fact, I have never been at one, either in a leadership position or as an operational responder, where in the aftermath I did not think, “If only we’d done that”, “If only we’d done better”, “If only we’d had the foresight to do that”, “If only our radios had worked better”, “If only we hadn’t rendezvoused at that point”, “If only the cordon position wasn’t there” or, “If only we could have got another four people to the floor above”. That tells me that this law is vital, particularly to the military, policing, the intelligence services and the emergency services. The noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, made a particularly good point about my colleagues in the healthcare profession, who are equally courageous and respond in spaces that are highly nuanced, with difficult decision-making. This law is particularly important to those organisations, and we must not shy away from it. You cannot be absolved from scrutiny, even if you lead an organisation of people who are genuinely heroic on a daily basis, as I did. In the London Fire Brigade, we were rescuing three people a day from genuinely life-threatening incidents where the firefighters responding could die. Multiple firefighters were injured every year, and colleagues were lost in that service. It was the same in the military. I am afraid that there is a great temptation within uniformed services—because of the heroic nature of what they do and the highly nuanced environment within which they take decisions—to seek absolution from this responsibility. It cannot be that way. That is not to diminish either the courage or the fantastic leadership I have experienced in my two careers, but I am afraid that this can cloud judgment at a point of criticality when you are scrutinised. On the one hand, you have this great responsibility to those you lead, who you have watched, as I did at Grenfell, put themselves in unbelievable harm’s way. Simultaneously, on the other hand, the institution in its widest context—over many decisions, over many years and over multiple leaders—has let those very people down. How do you square those two things? How do you keep people motivated and coming to work to do horrible things that the vast majority of people in this House will never have had to do and would never want to do? The answer is that you shine a light on that. What I want to say to noble Lords today is that this law is also for those in uniformed service—intelligence officers, special forces soldiers and armed police officers. At the time they face that scrutiny, people do not always feel it. Because the mechanisms to scrutinise bodies such as the organisation I run were not adequate, they did not feel they wanted it because it felt like an attack rather than normal business and what would be expected. I take the point about ethics—it is well made—but I believe you need sanction and guardrails to ensure that big institutions with their own power, their own histories, their own heroism, their own stories and their own version of the truth are duty-bound to stare into failure and acknowledge it. I say this from personal experience. The single biggest education I had post-Grenfell was from those who had lost the most: the families. Those were the hardest meetings, and they still are. I met with a survivor recently here, and he said to me, before we knew that this Bill would pass, that he was so tired. He was sick of campaigning, and he was sick of not being listened to. I mean no disrespect by this, but he said, “I don’t want to be like Margaret Aspinall in 20 years’ time. I don’t want to give my life to doing something that the state should just do and that a responsible democracy would put in place. I don’t want to do it any more”. So it is with great relief that I see that this Bill will pass. It is absolutely morally the right thing to do. I have two detailed points that I would like to come back to—I am sure we will. We have to strengthen the voice of those who suffer the most within the discharge of this Act. Whether it is by way of the IPA or another mechanism, we have to place them in the centre. As I said, the greatest education I had in the LFB was through bringing survivors and those who had lost their family members into a committee and a panel—along with those from, for example, the New Cross fire, who had suffered generationally before—and giving them agency within our decision-making. It was sometimes extremely uncomfortable. They did not always agree with us. I do not claim any moral superiority in this—we did it because we were made to, in a way—but doing so did us a great favour, and we need to see the same in this. I apologise for slightly overrunning. On public inquiries, there has to be an oversight mechanism. There is no point in making recommendations if you are not then held to account. As a man who was held to account, rightly, by the Home Secretary at the time in a special ministerial board, I say that it works. I thank noble Lords for their attention, and I look forward to the passage of the Bill.