Member

This Bill seeks to tackle failures in process. Admirable as that is, it does not address, except indirectly, this crucial question of giving greater agency to the victims and bereaved. The value of giving such agency is demonstrated by what the Hillsborough Family Support Group achieved. As I said at Second Reading, the Bill owes relatively little to all the efforts of politicians and of lawyers and so very much to how that group campaigned with such persistence, not over years but over decades, and with such dignity while suffering such terrible loss. That is what drove my setting up of the Hillsborough Independent Panel, which finally got to the truth of what happened, and that is what drove the noble Baroness, Lady May, to support in the face of considerable opposition the work of the Hillsborough Independent Panel when she became Home Secretary. That is what led eventually to this Bill.