Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)

The noble Lord, Lord Carter of Haslemere, and earlier the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy, raise a very important point. There is no point in passing a law under which you have to tell the truth at inquiries if, when the inquiries conclude, nothing happens. That is the problem with just passing laws. Maybe surprisingly, the one speech by the former Prime Minister and soon to be former MP, Keir Starmer, that I found moving and stirring related to the Hillsborough Bill. He said it was a law for the victims of “all the countless injustices over the years, suffered by working people at the hands of those who were supposed to serve them”. I genuinely choked up. He went on to name-check Horizon, Grenfell, infected blood, grooming gangs and Windrush. How depressing that we can all think of so many more examples of truth and justice being concealed behind the closed ranks of the state. The powerful speeches we have heard today reflect this. The idea of politicians admitting to this and even compelling public bodies and officials to be held accountable for state-related harms to ordinary people just feels momentous. Yet I have some qualms about overclaiming and hype, proclaiming that the law will shift the balance of power and lead to a culture change per se, as other noble Lords have noted. It all feels more serious than that, because, to be frank, we are in the midst of a democratic crisis. Over the Recess I read the UK Extremism and Democratic Resilience Centre’s report, Britain Under Strain—holiday-reading fun. The report details the data showing a chronic erosion of trust in the state that reached “historically low levels” and notes that a lack of faith in effective governance is deeply embedded in public opinion across left and right and all age groups. Shockingly, a growing number of the populace believe that the foundational bargain between the state and citizens is failing. Research and polling show that 61% believe the social contract—that stabilising web of reciprocal obligations that holds society together—is broken. Only 23% think it still works, and it is the state that is in breach of contract, not the public. That perception extends across demographic and socio-economic metrics. In other words, disillusion and collapse of trust have become mainstream—and is it any wonder? We might all argue about which example was the straw that broke the camel’s back. For me, it was following the oral evidence phase of the Nottingham inquiry. What a display of evasion, incompetence and even indifference. Multiple state agencies that had contact with a high-risk and non-compliant patient with a history of violence, Valdo Calocane, somehow failed to keep him under effective supervision, discharged him unmedicated into the community, failed to execute a live warrant, and on and on. That allowed him to murder Grace O’Malley-Kumar, Barnaby Webber and Ian Coates. It is unbearable that these were preventable deaths, and it is unbelievable that the exposé of the details—the answers swerved and the interpretation of the legalistic double-speak—became public only because the victims’ families took to social media to tell us what happened in the inquiry. I give a special shout out to Emma Webber, who painstakingly filmed daily updates of the horrors prised open begrudgingly in that inquiry. I still cannot believe that no one has lost their job over it all. While I despise those weaselly words that we hear, “lessons will be learned”—they rarely are—there actually were lessons from that inquiry about how parliamentary deliberations and the small print of laws that we pass can impact on operational decisions in the real world, sometimes with unintended consequences. For example, in the 2025 Theemis homicide review into Valdo Calocane’s care, it was found that NHS staff were acutely conscious of the legislative debate surrounding the Mental Health Bill about the alleged disproportionate use of coercive detention of Black and Afro-Caribbean patients. So, after Calocane tried to break into a neighbour’s flat, one doctor was leaning towards detention, but the inquiry counsel noted that the clinical team worried over representation of young Black men being sectioned, referencing the Bill, and chose monitoring in the community instead. Hours later, Calocane broke into another flat and a woman was so terrified that she jumped out of the window, sustaining horrible injuries. There is a cautionary note here: however much we broadly support the spirit of this legislation—and we all do—we have an obligation to raise critical concerns and ensure that the drafting and terminology are tight, clear and unambiguous, and we should not be overly rushed. We must ensure that there are guardrails so that we do not overcriminalise. The Law Society asks whether there is a risk that institutions keen to avoid criminal liability may resort to data dumping. We have to ensure that the criminal offence of misleading the public does not stifle legitimate political disagreement or debate, and that honest mistakes are taken as honest and we do not punish the wrong people. Finally, those who have emphasised that law change is not enough, and that we need a culture change, are absolutely right. But I worry when culture change is seen as deliverable by codes of conduct. I dread endless training sessions in candour and ethics. HR departments will have a field day, but I do not know what it will achieve. What I remember most vividly from Hillsborough, when growing up, was that the officially endorsed cultural attitude was contempt for football fans, who were talked about as scum. It is sad to say that such visceral snobbery about working class people is still prevalent. We heard it in the vile demonisation of Brexit voters as ignorant, duped deplorables; the name calling doled out at those worried about asylum hotels or HMOs in their areas, who were smeared as racist; the treatment of those who, for years, tried to talk about rape grooming gangs and who were labelled Islamophobic; and the young girls—child victims of gross sexual abuse—who went to the police and were arrested as prostitutes. Most members of the public have not been stonewalled at inquiries, but they have been gaslit by politicians who evade using candour with voters, and they have been hectored and hounded to dial down their fury for speaking inconvenient truths about state cover-ups. They are the real whistleblowers we should value. The public know when things are going wrong, so taking public concerns seriously is the culture change we need. That is how we will know when things are going wrong at the heart of the state, and we, at the heart of the state, should listen to them, not stonewall them or gaslight them. This Bill is the start, but it is the tip of the iceberg.