Louise Sandher-Jones

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I thank the hon. Member for North Down (Alex Easton) for securing this important debate and speaking with such passion on behalf of the bereaved families who were impacted by this tragic accident 31 years ago. As he will know, I am a veteran myself. I know that the pain of losing loved ones does not diminish with the passage of time, and nor should it. In this case, there is the added hurt for families of not knowing, after more than three decades, precisely why the Chinook crashed or why their loved ones died. As he may know, I served in the Intelligence Corps. The loss of the Intelligence Corps personnel on board was felt when I joined in 2014 and, indeed, I discussed it with former colleagues recently. Their legacy is very much still alive and the impact of their service very much still remembered. Colleagues will be well aware that the courts are considering the Chinook Justice Campaign’s request for a judicial review of the ministerial decision not to grant a new public inquiry into the accident. The judicial review process is a vital mechanism to hold public bodies to account and the courts will make their decision fairly and impartially. I will not provide a summary of our response to the courts or justify our position, but I will touch on a few points, including those raised in the debate. I want to focus on the lessons that have been learned and applied as a lasting legacy of the 29 people who we lost that day and I know are greatly missed. It is vital that the public have confidence that those of us in positions of responsibility will honour our commitment to the duty of candour. That is the message at the heart of the Public Authority (Accountability) Bill, which I am pleased to say has cross-party support for the reasons that we have heard several Members address today. I want to address some of the points about the files that are held in the National Archives. There are claims that the files contain vital information about the cause of the crash, and that the information has been intentionally withheld. As we have stated publicly, the documents contained in the files have been reviewed by officials, who have confirmed that they contain no information that would offer new insights into the crash. I understand that only 0.1% of the documents are subject to the 100-year review. Most of those relate not to maintenance or repair logs, but to compensation or personal details, which of course was the reasoning for the 100-year closure in the first place.