Baroness Featherstone (LD)

My Lords, I very much welcome the Bill. The Hillsborough families had not only to endure an unimaginable loss but then to spend decades trying to establish the truth about what had happened. Sadly, public institutions so often respond to appalling situations by becoming defensive, protecting their reputations, rather than by being open about their own actions. The duty of candour and assistance is a very important change, and so too is the attempt to address the inequality between bereaved families and public authorities at inquests and inquiries. However, there is an aspect of institutional failure, which I hope we can explore as the Bill progresses. The Bill quite properly deals with what institutions must do when something has gone badly wrong and an inquiry or investigation follows, but the history that has brought us to this Bill raises an earlier and important question: what on earth was happening inside those institutions while the wrongdoing was taking place? Many of our major scandals demonstrate that the eventual revelation was not by any means the first occasion on which anybody knew that something might be wrong. There had been warnings, complaints or people within an organisation who had tried to raise concerns, who often found themselves on gardening leave or signing NDAs for a sum of money. The abuse by Jimmy Savile was not uncovered—not because nobody had ever had concerns about him; the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse repeatedly demonstrated that institutions had received information about the abuse long before they responded adequately. On the Infected Blood Inquiry, I would like to put on record my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady May, although she is not in her place, for commissioning that inquiry after 35 or 40 years of people trying to get justice. I declare my own interest, because one of my sister’s twin boys had haemophilia and was infected with hepatitis C, and he died aged 35, leaving a 10 month-old baby daughter. The blood inquiry exposed failures that had happened over many years, in which information existed but was not confronted. To this day, and despite an excellent inquiry, those who lied and covered up what happened have suffered no detriment. When I talk about this, and I have not said this publicly before, I believe that the state killed my nephew, because it was known in the Department of Health. It was known that there was a cover-up. They knew they were giving infected blood, so they murdered him—forgive me—not to mention the Church and paedophilia. The cases are very different, but they reveal a recurring institutional problem: the desire of an organisation to protect its reputation. At that point, it becomes something more dangerous—a reason not to ask the questions that might produce damaging answers. Of course, reputation matters to public institutions, but there is an important distinction between earning public confidence by dealing honestly with failure and seeking to preserve public confidence by preventing failure becoming known. Once an organisation crosses that line, its incentives become distorted. A complaint may cease to be regarded as information that needs investigating and instead be regarded as a reputational problem that needs managing. The person raising a concern becomes someone who is seen as a problem and is treated as such. The Bill recognises part of this. It requires public authorities to promote high standards of ethical conduct and to adopt codes dealing with candour, complaints and protected disclosures. I do not think that we have got the balance right between the responsibilities of the person who raises a concern and the responsibilities of those who receive it. We spend a great deal of time, quite properly, considering whistleblowers, but in many of these scandals somebody did speak up. Sometimes, many people spoke up. The failure was that the institution did not listen. That raises a very different question of accountability, because if somebody in a position of responsibility receives credible evidence of serious wrongdoing or a continuing risk to others, what responsibility do they have in the Bill to ensure that it is properly examined? It is not enough to provide a whistleblowing procedure if those receiving the warning can satisfy their responsibility by processing the complaint rather than confronting what it says. I recognise that there are difficulties in translating that into law. Not every complaint should trigger a major investigation; allegations can be mistaken, malicious or impossible to substantiate; and those running public services must be able to exercise reasonable judgment. But where there is credible evidence of serious wrongdoing, systemic failure or a continuing risk of significant harm, should there not be a positive responsibility for those in positions of authority to ensure that it is properly investigated and acted on? I would be interested to hear from the Minister how far he believes the provisions in the Bill already achieve that. I do not think they do. The Bill’s stated purpose is that public authorities should “at all times act with candour, transparency and frankness”, yet the specific enforcement duty of candour and assistance is principally tied only to inquiries and investigations. If we are serious about changing institutional behaviour, that principle has to operate at the point when the difficult decisions are being made, not at the later point when an inquiry asks why those decisions were made. A critical question for me, as the Bill progresses, is whether it imposes sufficient responsibility and sufficient consequences on those at the top who receive credible warnings and fail to act. The duty of candour should help us establish the truth when something has gone wrong, but the greater achievement would be to ensure that uncomfortable truths are confronted early enough and that action is taken, so that disasters never happen in the first place.