Lord Wills (Lab)

My Lords, before I turn to the amendments in my name in this group, I will say how much I agree with everything my noble friend just said. If the Government can accept his amendment it will go quite a long way to help the Bill deliver its objectives. Without it, there has to be a question over it, so I very much hope the Government will look sympathetically at what my noble friend just said. I turn to the amendments in my name. Amendment 33 again addresses what must be the overriding objective of the Bill, which is always to keep the bereaved and the victims of state failures front and centre of everything that happens. That is why, of course, it is known colloquially as the Hillsborough Bill. As I keep saying, the objectives must be to find the truth quickly—how and why this thing happened—and then for accountability to follow without delay. Delay is the crucial problem so often in these things, making it incredibly hard for the victims and the bereaved to find any kind of closure. That must be a priority of every process that goes through in the wake of these state failures. That is what has always been denied for so long to the victims of these disasters and was so criminally delayed for the Hillsborough families. Part of the problem—not the only part—is the protracted nature of public inquiries that almost inevitably follow failures by the state. They investigate what happens and determine accountability, but the problem is that they do not do it quickly. They cannot, because part of their job, as well as investigating the issues of direct concern to the immediate victims of such state failures, is seeking to learn the lessons for public policy in the future. As a result, they can and do take many years and cost hundreds of millions of pounds. I agree with the Minister when he says that cost must not be the priority here, but it is a consideration. Therefore, there must be a question about whether public inquiries are always fit to meet the purposes of this Bill. This amendment simply requires the Government to address that question. Amendment 107 seeks to address the concerns of many victims of state failure: that the offences introduced in the Bill might be too lenient. These offences replace those which exist elsewhere and the sentencing limits for those offences match the Law Commission’s recommendations. I accept that. However, I hope my noble friend the Minister will recognise that the new sentences will often appear to victims of these offences as inappropriately lenient compared with those currently in effect. For example, some Hillsborough families expressed their view to me that after all the suffering they have inexcusably endured—not for years but for decades—as a result of such offences, a maximum two-year prison sentence minimises the seriousness of the offence. In these circumstances, this amendment would require only that these sentences are kept under review, assessed in the context of the severity of the offences committed and the consequences for those affected by them and, where appropriate, revised to act as the deterrent that they are intended to be.