Andy Burnham: Hillsborough Law is chance to create a legal legacy for disaster victims

NEXT month marks the 28th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster and the first anniversary of the historic verdict of the second inquest.
The illumination on St George's Hall, Liverpool, after a second inquest ruled that 96 Liverpool fans were unlawfully killed at the 1989 FA Cup semi-final.The illumination on St George's Hall, Liverpool, after a second inquest ruled that 96 Liverpool fans were unlawfully killed at the 1989 FA Cup semi-final.
The illumination on St George's Hall, Liverpool, after a second inquest ruled that 96 Liverpool fans were unlawfully killed at the 1989 FA Cup semi-final.

Whatever the sense of relief felt a year ago, it will never wipe away the pain of the 27 wilderness years between those two events and the incalculable toll on thousands of lives. We await accountability for that.

All those years, the evidence sat in official files, but our political, legal and coronial systems did not uncover it. Nor did the media. Worse, they actively colluded in a cover-up advanced in the committee rooms of the House of Commons. I said it then, and I say it again: Hillsborough must be a watershed moment in this country – a point in history when the scales of justice are tipped firmly in favour of ordinary families fighting for loved ones.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

That is what the Public Authority (Accountability) Bill, or Hillsborough law, seeks to achieve. It is a powerful Bill proposed and supported by all of the Hillsborough families, and by the Hillsborough Family Support Group and the Hillsborough Justice Campaign.

Its aim is simple: to protect other families from going through what the Hillsborough families went through and from a similar miscarriage of justice. It empowers victims to secure disclosure of crucial information and prevent public authorities from lying to them or hiding the truth by making that an imprisonable offence.

It empowers decent police officers and public servants to stand up to seniors trying to make them stick to a misleading corporate line, and it makes it an offence for such a line to be peddled to the media. Crucially, it creates a level legal playing field at inquests for bereaved families so that finally inquests become what they should always be – a vehicle to get to the truth.

After last year’s verdict the chair of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, Margaret Aspinall, came to Westminster to speak of her experience in the early 1990s. I do not think that anyone present will ever forget her talking of her pain when she was sent an official letter with a cheque for £1,226.35, which was supposed to represent compensation for her son James’s life. She spoke of how she was forced to cash it against her will because she could not find the money to pay her £3,000 share of the families’ legal costs. She said: “Making a mother, like myself, accept a pittance in order to fight a cause. The guilt of this has lived with me for the past 28 years.”

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

It would at least be something if we could say that would not happen today, but sadly we cannot. Since the Hillsborough verdict, the families of those who died in the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings have, quite wrongly and unbelievably, been made to beg for legal aid. There are thousands of other hidden individual cases in which bereaved families are denied legal representation while the public bodies they are up against in court spend public money like water, hiring the best QCs in the land. As cuts to legal aid bite, the problem just gets worse.

The brutal and uncomfortable truth is this: bereaved families are not just denied legal funding; they have their character questioned and denigrated by lawyers for public bodies. They are thrown into courtrooms, raw with grief, pitched into an adversarial battle and effectively put on trial. How much longer are we in this place going to let vast sums of public money be used to torment families in this way? If the state can cover up 96 deaths at a football match, should not we be concerned at what it might do to individuals?

I disagree with those who say that the Bill would add costs. The practical 
effect would be to create a new incentive on public bodies to limit their own 
legal expenditure. By making them come clean at the outset, the Bill would cut the length of inquests and inquiries and thereby make considerable savings. It would promote good public administration and public confidence in the police.

Most importantly, it would rebalance our legal system in favour of ordinary people. Until that happens, the true lesson of Hillsborough will not have been learned. What has disappointed me most in the last year is to see how things have reverted to business as usual. For the establishment, it seems as though Hillsborough was the one that got away, rather than the catalyst for change that it should have been.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

If the Bill became law, it would be the right way for Parliament to make reparation and create a permanent legislative legacy for the 96 people who died on April 15, 1989. Last year, the Prime Minister asked Bishop James Jones to conduct a review of the experience of the Hillsborough families. On behalf of the whole House, I thank the bishop again for his incredible service to those families and everyone affected by the tragedy, and respectfully ask him to consider adopting this Bill as part of his recommendations.

We like to talk of this country as a paragon of democracy and the rule of law, but I ask every MP to think of the constituents they have met at their surgeries who have spent years fighting for justice, picture the lines on their faces, and ask “Is this country fair to people who, through no fault of their own, find themselves fighting for loved ones?” We all know the answer: no. The fight is too hard, it takes too great a toll and it grinds people down. This is not a country of justice, as we like to claim.

Andy Burnham is a Labour MP who tabled the Hillsborough Law before Parliament on Wednesday. This is an edited version.