With a Hillsborough law, Labour has a chance to lead the way on victims’ justice

The Tories’ lurch to the right has ended any hope of a cross-party consensus on victims’ rights. A new Hillsborough law is long-overdue, and should be delivered alongside a wider programme to improve public inquiries and accountability.

No political party has a God-given right to the moral high ground on victims’ rights. Labour’s right to speak with authority on these issues has to be earned, and can only be granted by victims themselves. It depends on the commitments we make, the candour we show, and the way we respond when public disasters come to light.

The last Labour government made some great strides in improving public accountability, backed by unprecedented investment in public services and a raft of improved rights to redress and information. It was Labour, with Andy Burnham as Culture Secretary, who first started the process of the Hillsborough inquiry in 2009 – two decades after the disaster took place.

But in the case of some other public scandals, Labour proved as reluctant to act as its predecessors. Andy Burnham has recounted that during his time as Health Secretary, he faced considerable resistance from officials over the issue of whether to hold an inquiry into the infected blood scandal of the 1970s-1990s. He has since described it as a “criminal cover-up on an industrial scale” – sentiments echoed by Lord Owen, a Labour health minister in the 1970s.

Dubbed “the worst treatment disaster in the history of the NHS“, this scandal led to the deaths of thousands of people as a result of infection with HIV and Hepatitis C from NHS-supplied blood and blood products. It had a devastating impact on the community of people with haemophilia, who received blood products sourced from US private donors without ever being informed of the severe risk of contamination.

The case of the infected blood scandal shows that all political parties have lessons to learn about how victims are treated and how redress for public scandals is secured. It wasn’t until July 2017 that the government, then under Theresa May, commissioned an inquiry into the disaster. This only happened after decades of campaigning, culminating in a cross-party letter calling on May to commit to an inquiry – backed by her then-coalition partners the DUP, and coordinated by Labour’s Dame Diana Johnson MP. I was privileged to have been a part of that campaign since 2014.

This highlights an all too familiar problem: those affected by disasters have to fight, often over many decades, to be believed by public authorities. Indeed even after public inquiries are commissioned, victims face an uphill struggle to secure a thorough, engaging and far-reaching inquiry. The terms of reference for the Grenfell tower inquiry have been criticised as too narrow, and in the case of infected blood it took months of further campaigning from victims, three urgent questions and an intervention by the former chair of the Hillsborough inquiry to get the inquiry on the right track.

All hope of a cross-party consensus on this seems to have been lost. Theresa May pursued the Hillsborough inquiry whilst Home Secretary, and subsequently appointed its chair to a wider inquiry on the experience of victims. The campaign for a Hillsborough law has drawn from this – their call for a duty of candour is one of his inquiry’s recommendations. But neither Boris Johnson nor Liz Truss have shown any commitment to carrying forward this or other proposals.

Keir Starmer is right to seize the agenda with his commitment to a new Hillsborough law. But as I have argued before, my experience of the infected blood inquiry has taught me that the wider process of commissioning public inquiries also needs to be significantly improved. Shortly after the infected blood inquiry was announced, the Department of Health wrote to victims giving them a false choice: a dispassionate statutory public inquiry, held under the 2005 Inquiries Act and with full powers to compel witnesses to provide evidence; or a compassionate non-statutory ‘Hillsborough-style’ panel, with close engagement with those affected but no legal powers to compel the provision of evidence.

This was an unforgivable message to send to victims who had suffered the worst trauma and bereavement: a choice between justice or compassion. After nearly 18 months of fighting by campaigners, I am hopeful that infected blood inquiry will ultimately secure both. The 2005 Inquiries Act and associated guidance needs to be updated make this process significantly easier. A good start would be to give victims a statutory right to be consulted on inquiry terms of reference.

The issue of victims’ justice and public accountability really shouldn’t divide across party lines. It is testament to how far gone the Conservatives are that they have allowed it to become so. Too many victims have to wait decades to even see recognition to the impact that public scandals have on them, let alone the outcome of public inquiries. Let us hope the wait for a Hillsborough law isn’t so long.

Tom Stephens has been part of part of the campaign to justice for those affected by the contaminated blood scandal since 2014. He drafted a 2015 report into the poor financial support for those affected and subsequently worked for Diana Johnson MP on the parliamentary initiative to secure an inquiry. He writes here in a personal capacity.