Hillsborough Law, peace for victims
Prime minister Keir Starmer confirmed at the Labour conference that the Hillsborough law will finally be brought forward to parliament before April next year.
The law is named after the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, where 97 Liverpool football club fans were crushed to death and the South Yorkshire Police suggested that rowdy fans were to blame rather than failures in policing and stadium design. Initially, the Director of Public Prosecutions found no evidence to prosecute any individuals, but fierce campaigning led to 6 charges being made in 2017– twenty-eight years later.
The new law will aim to prevent the decades of campaigning so many people are forced to do post-tragedy. Too many times has an event been followed by years-long and drawn out investigations, a lack of responsibility and a blame game, and lack of criminal consequences for those who deserve it. Too many times have there been avoidable deaths where cogs in the system are dishonest about their own failures.
Any people or organisations that are dishonest or obstruct investigations into failures could face criminal consequences with a new legal duty to be honest. Public bodies would be given new ethics codes to prevent the blame game and defensiveness displayed in several scandals. Recommendations made following a report into Hillsborough would be implemented: an independent public advocate (IPA) sent to the scene of any future disaster to play a vital role in relaying information to victims and families such as legal processes, services available, and any help provided by local authorities— the IPA would also be an intermediary between victims and public authorities. This IPA is expected to be appointed at some point next year.
Miscarriages of justice have become rife in the United Kingdom and successive governments haven’t seemed to care. Last month, the Grenfell fire inquiry published a damning report, laying practically all parties involved at fault, with everybody entangled in a ‘web of blame’ and shifting responsibility. The disaster in 2017 killed 72 people when a tower block was rapidly engulfed in flames.
The event itself was harrowing— within twenty minutes, the crackling and sparkler-esque fire raced up the facade of the building. One manufacturer had concealed the true danger of the cladding, while another made misleading claims about it being suitable. Consistently, private companies had, for profit, failed to comply with regulations and hid it.
Government failed too. The type of cladding implemented had failed fire safety tests— describing them as ‘burning violently’, a terrible foresight— which the government had kept confidential and refused to ban despite alarms ringing as early as fires in 1992 and 1999. Local council Kensington and Chelsea quote, “demonstrated a marked lack of respect for human decency and dignity” regarding its response to victims post-disaster. Emergency services had undergone cuts during austerity and fire brigades had failed to do needed training on tower-block-fire responses.
The privatisation of institutions such as the Building Research Establishment, and efforts by multiple governments to deregulate, has eroded standards and helped private companies put people at risk.
The infected blood scandal is particularly horrifying. It occurred across 20 years beginning in the 1970s: Thirty thousand people given blood transfusions in the NHS were accidentally infected with hepatitis C or HIV, leading to over 3,000 deaths since. Too little was done to regulate blood-donating, with prisoners or drug users being allowed to give blood until 1986, and half-truths were told from both the government and doctors to ignore it. Labour have said they will pay compensation, potentially costing billions.
The Post Office scandal has been ongoing for several decades now too and reached its crescendo at the tail-end of the Conservative government when, despite alarm bells ringing for years, an ITV documentary led by Toby Jones exposed the scandal to the general public. A fault in Horizon, software developed by Japanese IT company Fujitsu, had falsely accused thousands of innocent sub postmasters of theft and fraud, with 700 prosecuted by the Post Office.
Some had to cover shortfalls with their own money, get sacked, enter into massive debt, held up in court cases, or general stress, over years. During the event, subpostmasters were told that they were the only ones to ‘commit the crime’ despite hundreds suffering the same, and didn’t find the massive uptick on prosecution rates suspicious. Rishi Sunak, prime minister at the time, rightly described it as a great miscarriage of justice— compensation is expected to cost over £1 billion, while in May parliament overturned all convictions.
The new law is a great progress. Mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham praised the new law, and the director of Inquest, a charity relating to state-related deaths, remarked that “today is a step forward in providing a legacy for the 97 so that others do not have to go through the pain and trauma of decades of campaigning.” It will hopefully not only limit the suffering of families over their entire lives, but also lessen bureaucracy and get recommendations from these reports in place quicker to prevent future disasters. If recommendations were in place after the 1992 or 1999 tower fires, Grenfell could have been prevented.
But the focal point of the law is surrounding post-disaster care, helping victims and finding the key causes of these disasters. However, all of these scandals have been avoidable, and the law could go further in preventing large-scale failings before they happen and cause irreparable damage to people’s lives. Toughening up regulations or introducing new regulatory bodies to check companies are telling the truth about what they are manufacturing would be a good step to take.
Unfortunately, it would be pretty difficult to encourage the dominant neo-liberals in politics today that more regulation may save lives. The text of the new code of ethics and the appointment of IPA will be important too in determining how committed the government is, but it is wonderful that they are viewing this matter with great urgency.
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