14 July 2026
Source text: Bill 7 (59/2), reintroduced at report stage
Summary
The Public Office (Accountability) Bill, the Hillsborough Law, is the most significant statutory rebalancing of the citizen–state relationship in the investigative sphere since the Human Rights Act 1998.
It converts candour from an aspiration of public life into an enforceable legal duty backed by personal criminal liability, ends the structural inequality of arms between bereaved families and publicly funded institutional lawyers at inquests, and replaces the medieval common law offence of misconduct in public office with modern statutory offences carrying up to fourteen years’ imprisonment.
The timing of this review is exceptional.
The Bill is scheduled to complete its Commons report stage and third reading today, 14 July 2026, after a six-month impasse over the intelligence services was resolved in the campaigners’ favour.
Six days later, on 20 July, Andy Burnham, the politician most personally identified with the Hillsborough justice campaign over two decades, is expected to become Prime Minister. The Act’s Lords passage and Royal Assent will therefore fall under a Burnham premiership, with consequences for its implementation, extension and political ownership.
| KEY JUDGEMENT
For the ordinary UK citizen unfortunately caught up in the next Hillsborough, Grenfell or Horizon, the practical experience of seeking truth will be materially different: funded legal representation without a means test, a state under proactive disclosure obligations from day one, statutory restraint on institutional lawyering, and criminal jeopardy hanging over concealment. For balance, what the Act cannot legislate is culture, and the two-year battle over the intelligence carve-out demonstrates how instinctive institutional self-protection remains, even while Parliament legislates against it. |
Status and provenance
The attached document is the carry-over print of the Bill (Bill 7, 59/2), reintroduced at report stage and printed on 14 May 2026, presented by Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy with the support of the Prime Minister.
The Bill implements the Labour Party’s 2024 manifesto commitment to place a legal duty of candour on public servants and provide legal aid for victims of disasters and state-related deaths. Its passage has been anything but smooth, and the chronology matters because it reveals both the strength of the campaign coalition and the depth of institutional resistance.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 16 Sep 2025 | Bill introduced in the Commons by the Starmer government. |
| 3 Nov 2025 | Second reading passed without division; broad cross-party support in principle. |
| 27 Nov–4 Dec 2025 | Public bill committee, including evidence from Hillsborough families, the Law Commission and INQUEST; government amendments accepted, including extension to inquiries of the grooming-gangs type. |
| 14–19 Jan 2026 | Report stage twice postponed, then pulled entirely, over the application of the duty of candour to the intelligence services. Campaigners condemned the proposed approach as a carve-out. |
| 27 Apr 2026 | Carry-over motion passed; without it the Bill would have fallen at the end of the 2024–26 session. |
| 14 May 2026 | Bill reintroduced at report stage in the new session (the print reviewed here). |
| 12–13 Jul 2026 | Government announces resolution of the intelligence-services question; amendments tabled applying the duty of candour to individual intelligence employees and ex-employees without carve-outs. |
| 14 Jul 2026 | Report stage and third reading scheduled in the Commons; Bill then proceeds to the Lords. |
A critical caveat on the attached print: section 6 as printed, which disapplies the individual self-notification obligation for intelligence service personnel and routes candour through agency record-keeping arrangements, does not represent the final Commons position.
The amendments being debated this week create a process in which intelligence employees provide information under the duty of candour through the head of their organisation, with individuals and former employees now within scope.
Ian Byrne MP, parliamentary lead for the Hillsborough Law Now campaign, has confirmed the government agreed to deliver the measure without carve-outs, applying the duty across all government departments. The final text should be verified against Hansard and the as-amended print once published.
Main contents of the Bill
The Bill is built around a single architecture: statutory candour, criminal enforcement, cultural obligation, and procedural parity. Five components carry the weight.
The duty of candour and assistance (Part 2, Chapter 1; Schedule 1)
Section 2 imposes an always-on duty on public authorities and public officials to act with candour, transparency and frankness in their dealings with inquiries and investigations. The duty has three elements.
- First, a proactive self-notification obligation (s.2(3)): the moment an authority or official has grounds to believe their acts or information may be relevant, they must notify the person leading the inquiry, as soon as reasonably practicable after becoming aware of its establishment.
- Second, a comprehensive assistance obligation (s.2(4)), activated by a written “compliance direction” from the inquiry chair, senior coroner, procurator fiscal, sheriff or equivalent under Schedule 1: provide all relevant information, flag material of particular significance, correct errors, and, for authorities, provide a position statement.
- Third, a personal duty on the individual in charge of the authority, defined as the chief executive (s.2(5) with s.8(2)–(3)), to take all reasonable steps to secure institutional compliance.
Section 2(6) is quietly one of the most important provisions in the Bill: compliance must be expeditious and “without favour to their own, or another person’s, position”, a direct statutory prohibition on institutional self-protection, the precise behaviour that defined the aftermath of Hillsborough, Horizon, Grenfell and infected blood.
Section 4 extends the duty beyond the state: private persons with health-and-safety responsibilities in connection with an incident, or carrying out activities under direct contract to a public authority with significant public impact, are brought within scope. This captures the Grenfell-type constellation of contractors and management organisations.
Schedule 1, Part 7 contains a regulation-making power to extend the duty further, to criminal, regulatory and supervisory investigations and investigations into public services, including an urgency procedure allowing extension to a specified investigation with retrospective parliamentary approval within 40 days.
Criminal enforcement of the duty (s.5; Schedule 3)
Failure to comply becomes an offence where the person intends their failure to impede the inquiry achieving its objectives, or, for directed obligations under s.2(4)–(5), is reckless as to whether it will do so. Maximum penalty: two years’ imprisonment on indictment. Schedule 3 extends liability to directors, managers and equivalent officers who consent to or connive in a body’s offence, applies extraterritorially to UK nationals and habitual residents, and requires DPP consent for prosecution.
Standards of ethical conduct (Part 2, Chapter 2)
Every public authority must promote and maintain high standards of ethical conduct anchored to the seven Nolan principles, selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, leadership, and must adopt, publicise and publish a code of ethical conduct. The code must embed a duty of candour as a workplace expectation, set out disciplinary consequences up to gross misconduct, and provide whistleblowing routes (with protected-disclosure information) and public complaint mechanisms. This chapter converts candour from an inquiry-time obligation into a permanent employment-law reality across the public sector.
Misleading the public (Part 2, Chapter 3, s.11)
A new offence is created where a public authority or official, in that capacity, acts with intent to mislead the public or recklessness as to whether the act will do so, knowing (or where they ought to know) that the act is seriously improper. “Seriously improper” is defined by a cumulative triple test: dishonesty that is significant or repeated (by falsehood, concealment or obfuscation) on matters of significant public concern; actual or potential harm, expressly including psychological distress and economic loss; and significant departure from the proper exercise of the person’s functions. Maximum penalty: two years. Defences exist for acts necessary to intelligence or armed forces functions on active service, and a reasonable-excuse defence carrying only an evidential burden. Journalism by recognised news publishers is excluded, as are acts done in exercise of devolved functions.
Replacement of misconduct in public office (Part 3)
The centuries-old common law offence of misconduct in public office, long criticised by the Law Commission as vague and erratically applied, is abolished (s.16) and replaced by two statutory offences. Section 12 criminalises using public office (including failing to use a power or position) to obtain a benefit or inflict a detriment, knowing it to be seriously improper; benefit and detriment expressly include reputational and sexual benefit or detriment, and juries are directed to structured factors including breach of trust in relation to vulnerable individuals. Maximum: ten years. Section 13 criminalises breach of a duty to prevent death or serious injury where the officeholder intentionally or recklessly causes, or creates a significant risk of, critical harm, and the conduct falls far below what could reasonably be expected. Maximum: fourteen years. Schedule 4 defines holders of public office expansively — ministers, MPs and peers’ staff, parliamentarians, civil servants, police, the judiciary, armed forces, prison and parole personnel, and local government members and staff. Both offences require DPP consent.
Parity at inquests and inquiries (Part 4; Schedule 6)
This is the equality-of-arms component, and for bereaved families the most immediately tangible. It comprises: Lord Chancellor guidance on the conduct expected of public authorities at inquiries and inquests; a statutory restraint requiring authorities to engage legal representatives only if, and so far as, necessary and proportionate, having explicit regard to the comparative means of affected persons; a mechanism enabling inquiry chairs and senior coroners to report misconduct by an authority or its lawyers to those with power to act, and to compel a written response; an overriding objective, to be set in rules, ensuring affected persons, in particular bereaved family members, can participate fully and effectively while preserving the inquisitorial character of proceedings; and non-means-tested legal aid for bereaved family members at any inquest where a public authority is an interested person (Schedule 6, Part 4, amending LASPO 2012).
| Offence | Maximum penalty | Key threshold |
|---|---|---|
| Failing to comply with duty of candour and assistance (s.5) | 2 years / fine | Intent to impede; recklessness suffices for directed obligations |
| Misleading the public (s.11) | 2 years / fine | Triple test of serious impropriety; reasonable-excuse defence |
| Seriously improper use of public office (s.12) | 10 years | Benefit/detriment + knowledge of serious impropriety; DPP consent |
| Breach of duty to prevent death or serious injury (s.13) | 14 years | Conduct falling far below reasonable expectation; DPP consent |
What the Act gives ordinary citizens
- The burden of discovery is inverted. The Hillsborough families spent decades extracting truth from institutions whose default was silence; the families ultimately had to raise £63 million in legal funding across the various proceedings. Under s.2(3), silence itself becomes the wrongful act, and under s.5 potentially the criminal one. An officer who amended statements, or a department that sat on relevant documents, would face personal criminal jeopardy at the outset of an inquiry rather than exposure decades later.
- Non-means-tested legal aid ends the asymmetry in which the state deployed publicly funded counsel against unrepresented families, while the statutory restraint on public authority legal engagement limits the other side of the scale. Restraining state lawyering is the more elegant design choice: it is cheaper and more culturally corrective than simply funding more family lawyering.
- The chief-executive duty (s.2(5)) and officer-liability provisions (Schedule 3) attach personal statutory obligations to named senior individuals. The pattern in Hillsborough, Horizon and infected blood was that the organisation absorbed blame while individuals retired intact; that route is now considerably narrower.
- Section 4 means the outsourced state, the cladding contractor, the maintenance company, the IT provider, cannot stand outside the candour regime that binds its public client.
- Schedule 1, Part 7 allows the duty of candour to be applied by regulation to criminal, regulatory and public-services investigations, a ready-made mechanism to widen the Act’s reach without new primary legislation.
Limitations
- High mens rea thresholds. Section 5 requires intent to impede (recklessness only for directed obligations); s.11 requires a cumulative three-limb impropriety test plus a reasonable-person standard, with a reasonable-excuse defence. Prosecutions will be rare and hard. Arguably that is the point, the deterrent operates ex ante, but citizens should not expect a stream of convictions.
- Uneven territorial extent. The misleading-the-public offence and the new misconduct offences extend to England and Wales only, and s.11(4) excludes acts done in exercise of devolved functions entirely. A Scottish or Welsh official misleading the public on devolved matters commits no offence under this Act.
- Parliament is insulated. Both Houses are excluded bodies under Schedule 2, so s.11 does not reach parliamentary conduct as such. The gap has been raised in the Lords, and an amendment by Luke Myer MP to extend the misleading-the-public offence to members of both Houses attracted cross-party support at report stage. Whether it survives is one of the live questions in today’s proceedings.
- Crown immunity. Section 19(2) provides that no contravention by the Crown makes the Crown criminally liable, though its servants and agents remain fully exposed.
- Definitional elasticity. “Seriously improper” recurs throughout and has drawn criticism for vagueness, including from the shadow justice minister, who questioned whether the new offences would adequately hold senior decision-makers accountable. The elasticity cuts both ways: it gives juries latitude to convict egregious conduct that rigid drafting would miss, and gives well-advised officials litigable escape routes.
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The Hillsborough support groups
The campaign architecture behind this Bill deserves recognition as one of the most effective sustained civil-society legislative operations in modern British history. Its lineage runs from the Hillsborough Family Support Group and the Hillsborough Justice Campaign, the two family organisations that carried the fight from 1989 through the Independent Panel (2012) and the second inquests (2016), which found the 97 unlawfully killed, to the present Hillsborough Law Now coalition, which broadened the base to include families from the Manchester Arena bombing, Grenfell and infected blood.
The original Public Authority (Accountability) Bill of 2017 was proposed and supported by all the Hillsborough families and by both the HFSG and the HJC, and developed with their lawyers, with particular tribute owed to Pete Weatherby KC, who represented the families at the second inquests. It was Weatherby’s insight that a duty of candour alone was insufficient without a companion duty to assist, compelling officials to proactively supply information to inquiries. That insight is now section 2(4) of the Bill.
The coalition’s decisive contribution in 2025–26 was refusing the compromise. When government amendments on the intelligence services failed to meet campaigners’ expectations in January 2026, the coalition, fronted publicly by figures including Margaret Aspinall, whose eighteen-year-old son James died at Hillsborough, channelled legally through Weatherby and solicitor Elkan Abrahamson’s Hillsborough Law Now operation, and channelled parliamentarily through Ian Byrne MP, held the line for six months and absorbed the risk that the Bill would fall entirely at the session’s end. They were vindicated: the government has conceded a duty of candour applying to individual intelligence employees without carve-outs. Aspinall’s reaction, delight, after 37 years, and Byrne’s framing of the outcome as a true legacy for the 97 mark the moment as the campaign’s culmination.
Two observations follow.
First, the groups have been consistent that this law is not only about Hillsborough: their stated purpose is changing the culture of public authorities and preventing future cover-ups so that no family again spends decades fighting for truth. Second, they are not finished. Hillsborough Law Now has committed to working with peers and parliamentarians through the Lords stages, and they will police that passage as aggressively as they policed the Commons. Any attempt in the Lords to reopen the intelligence settlement or dilute the parity provisions will meet the same coalition that has now defeated the government machine twice.
Andy Burnham
The political ground has moved under this Bill in real time, and the conjunction is extraordinary. Burnham won the Makerfield by-election in June 2026, returning to the Commons after nine years as Mayor of Greater Manchester; following Keir Starmer’s resignation announcement he ran unopposed for the Labour leadership, and he is expected to become Prime Minister on 20 July, six days after the Bill’s likely Commons passage today.
Burnham’s Hillsborough history is the foundation myth of his political persona. As Culture Secretary he was heckled at Anfield at the 20th anniversary in 2009, the moment he chose the families over the government line, and responded by launching the Hillsborough Independent Panel, whose 2012 report demolished the official narrative.
He introduced the original Public Authority (Accountability) Bill in 2017 with Steve Rotheram as his final major act as an MP, alongside an hour-long adjournment debate on infected blood in which he described the scandal as a criminal cover-up on an industrial scale, forcing Theresa May into the public inquiry whose 2024 report vindicated him entirely. Candour-and-accountability is not just a Burnham policy; it is key element of the Burnham brand.
How he is likely to use it
- I’d expect Burnham to claim the Act’s completion as an early, emotionally resonant symbol of his premiership. The Lords stages and Royal Assent fall on his watch, and the framing writes itself: the man heckled at Anfield in 2009 signs the Hillsborough Law into existence as Prime Minister. For a leader whose entire pitch against the Starmer years is authenticity, northern working-class identity and intuitive retail politics, no legislative moment could serve better.
- First instalment of an accountability programme. Watch for full and rapid commencement, early use of the Schedule 1 Part 7 extension powers to apply candour to further categories of investigation, and possible support for closing the parliamentary loophole flagged by the Myer amendment. These regulation-making powers hand an incoming Burnham government a ready-made mechanism to widen the Act’s reach without new primary legislation, and every incentive exists to use it.
- Coalition maintenance. The Hillsborough constituency, Merseyside, the trade-union left, the Byrne wing of the PLP, overlaps heavily with the base Burnham needs to consolidate against the Greens’ advance (a Green candidate took the Gorton and Denton by-election Burnham was blocked from contesting in January). Delivering the full law, without carve-outs, is base management as much as legacy.
The ownership question
One caveat merits registration. Legacy legislation passed in a predecessor’s dying days carries an ownership ambiguity: Starmer introduced this Bill, and his government negotiated the final intelligence settlement, the outgoing administration’s sources are already claiming the win as a fundamental change in the balance of power between state and citizen.
Burnham’s counter is biographical rather than governmental: he was at Villa Park in Everton’s semi final, on that fateful day, as a fan in 1989, at Anfield in 2009, and behind the original Bill in 2017. In his case, biography will beat chronology, the public will read this as Burnham’s law regardless of whose government passed it.
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Caveats
- The attached print (Bill 7, 59/2, 14 May 2026) here) predates the government amendments on the intelligence services tabled for this week’s report stage; section 6 and Schedule 1 references to intelligence exemptions should be re-verified against the as-amended Bill once published. The description of the new mechanism (candour routed through agency heads, individuals and ex-employees in scope) is based on pre-debate press reporting of government sourcing, not enacted text.
- The Bill remains subject to Lords amendment; nothing in this report should be treated as a statement of enacted law. Commencement is by regulation (s.25), so practical effect will lag Royal Assent.
- Political analysis in Section 6 reflects the position as at 14 July 2026: Burnham’s accession as Prime Minister on 20 July is expected but not yet effected, and cabinet composition under his premiership is unconfirmed.
- Sources: the Bill as printed (Parliament, 14 May 2026); House of Commons Library briefings CBP-10359 and CBP-10424; House of Lords Library briefings on the Bill and clause 11; contemporaneous reporting from PA Media, the Law Gazette, the Guardian and Sky News (January–July 2026); Hillsborough Law Now campaign statements; and biographical records of Andy Burnham’s parliamentary career.