Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness’s enlivening contributions to our debates. May she go on boasting. Rightly, the Bill aims to ensure that the public service treats the public it serves with accountable candour and transparency. It is odd to feel that we need a Bill to achieve that end—it is something that should happen naturally between the public service and the public it serves—but, of course, we do, and we have had a number of Bills over the years that have dealt with public service conduct. I will mention another in a minute. The fact that it has taken 37 years to reach this necessary point is, as the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, reflected, a severe and lasting lesson for all of us who have taken any part in the public service. Again, it should not have to happen that way. What worries me about the Bill is not that we will, I hope, enact it—I am very much in favour of the principle of the Bill—but that we have done similar things before, not always with the success that we expected. We need to try to ensure that what emerges from the Bill delivers success for its aims. There is no room for complacency in our support for the Bill. I suggest that noble Lords, if they have not yet taken the time, read—just before they go to bed because it will be good bedtime reading—the very Long Title of the Bill. It illustrates in a few intense lines what we are trying to deal with here; it is not going to be an easy task. I commend, as others have done, the extraordinary efforts of the Hillsborough families, their legal representatives, the Horizon campaign and all those other campaigns that have been mentioned, in at last bringing a Bill of this kind to the House. The previous legislation I want to refer to is as follows. When I joined another place as a new MP in 1983, my baptism of fire was being put on the Standing Committee for what was then the Police and Criminal Evidence Bill—PACE 1984. This made enormous changes, particularly from the point of view of someone like me, who had been practising at the criminal Bar for the previous 13 or 14 years, in the way in which the police behaved in investigations. This had an ongoing effect on trials, where the conduct of those trials was much more normal in the way that it approached human behaviour. Judges were able not to conjure up directions to juries suggesting that police officers could remember all the content of a three-hour interview of which they had made notes the following day. Some of us here have been through that process. The answer was always, “We are trained to do that so we can remember three hours of interview”. So PACE made an enormous change in the way in which criminal cases were conducted, but it did not work in its entirety. One of the things that did work was the creation of codes of conduct, and Code C to PACE is an epic example of the way in which the approach to litigation—in that case, criminal litigation—can be improved by demanding that the public service follows codes of conduct. I welcome suggestions that have been made in this debate that there should be some codes of conduct which are envisaged by the legislation. Who drafts them may well be a matter for debate, which has already been raised. But even despite PACE, we had Hillsborough. A case in which I happened to be involved in the later stages was that of the Cardiff Three, in which three men were convicted of a murder they had absolutely nothing to do with. My involvement in the case was representing a young female prostitute who had been one of the false witnesses and was later prosecuted for her perjury. She had the good sense to plead guilty, and it was possible to show that she should have a short sentence because of the outrageous behaviour of the police, who had virtually locked her up in a flat behind a police station in south Wales. The police were prosecuted, but they managed to get away with it. They concealed documents that were relevant to the trial until it was too late to produce them because the judge had stopped the trial. That is one example of egregious behaviour by a public service despite there being legislation that is supposed to prevent it. The Horizon case, so eloquently spoken of by my old friend, the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, is another example. I prosecuted postmasters in some Horizon cases. I was quite an experienced barrister by then. I was not told by anybody that there could be an iota of doubt about the computer material, which we as prosecutors were told provided cast-iron evidence against the defendants. We have to bear in mind that we can make mistakes even after legislation of that kind. There are two short points that I want to mention. The first concerns national security. I am one of two former Independent Reviewers of Terrorism Legislation who have spoken in this debate. I believe that what is provided in the Bill is adequate. It produces a solution to a very difficult equation—nobody should underestimate the difficulty—between national security, which, as my noble friend next to me told the House, is a very delicate thing, and the honesty of the public service. It is very important that we enact that part of the Bill. The second point is about inquests. I appeared recently at an inquest in south Wales concerning a death that resulted from misbehaviour in the local mental health service. The internal inquiry was a disgrace. There were concealments of documents. People did not come forward to say what had happened. There had to be an inquest. It was conducted by an excellent deputy coroner. We must ensure that such inquests continue in large numbers, and that the advocates who appear at those inquests are properly remunerated for the work they do so that there is equality of arms in those cases. The Independent Public Advocate, who is a brilliant person, cannot do it on her own. She will have to instruct lawyers to appear. She cannot go to every inquest. We must make sure that those inquests are properly and fairly conducted in accordance with the spirit of this legislation.