Following its successful passage through the House of Commons in July, the Hillsborough Law (formally known as the Public Office (Accountability) Bill) is due to commence its legislative journey through the House of Lords in the coming weeks. As such, it seems like an opportune moment to take stock and reflect on the Bill’s aims and objectives, and, importantly, the parliamentary challenges it has faced so far. It also offers a chance to look to the future and consider what problems the Hillsborough Law may face upon its eventual enactment. And, crucially, can it succeed in achieving its ultimate stated objective — to secure meaningful culture change in the UK?
I begin by briefly recapping the structure of the legislation and considering its key provisions, including the new General Duty of Candour (GDoC). Then we examine the parliamentary challenges the Bill has faced, focusing in particular on the delays caused by the security service’s resistance to a number of its key provisions. Finally, the Bill’s implementation is covered and we consider whether, once enacted, it is likely to succeed in changing the UK’s entrenched culture of cover-ups.
Structure of the legislation
The Hillsborough Law was first introduced to Parliament in September 2025 by then-Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. The Bill gives effect to the Labour Party’s manifesto commitment to support the long-standing Hillsborough Law Now campaign, which seeks to place public authorities under a duty to tell the truth and to cooperate proactively with official investigations and inquiries. British history is replete with examples of institutional dishonesty and state-sanctioned cover-ups beyond the Hillsborough disaster itself, including the Post Office Scandal, the Infected Blood Scandal, the Aberfan Disaster, the Primodos Scandal, to name just a few. It is against this backdrop that upon its introduction Keir Starmer declared: that “the Bill is the architecture, but the culture of the state has to change.”
In terms of this “architecture”, the Bill comprises of five key elements:
1) Duty of Candour and Assistance (Chapter One) — Chapter One of the Bill creates a new ‘Duty of Candour and Assistance’ which places a legal obligation on all public authorities and officials to ‘act with candour, transparency and frankness in their dealings with inquiries and investigations’. In particular, authorities and officials are obliged to do three things as soon as a relevant inquiry, inquest or investigation is established:
i) pro-actively notify an inquiry or investigation if they believe that either their acts may be relevant, or they have information that is likely to be relevant;
ii) provide all such assistance that they can reasonably give to an inquiry or investigation. This may mean disclosing ‘relevant’ information, drawing attention to information of particular significance, correcting any errors or omissions in previously provided information and setting out a position statement; and
iii) the public official in charge of a public authority subject to the DoCA [‘Duty of Candour and Assistance’] is personally responsible for ensuring the authority takes all reasonable steps to comply with the first two obligations.
Crucially, criminal liability for a breach of the Chapter One can be imposed upon individual public officials where it can be proven that the individual official intended to impede the inquiry/investigation or they recklessly failed to uphold their duty.
2) General Duty of Candour (Chapter Two) — The General Duty of Candour is contained in Chapter Two of the Bill. Public authorities are required to ‘promote and take steps to maintain high standards of ethical conduct at all times by people who work for the authority’. In discharging this duty, public authorities must take three steps: they must i) adopt a code of ethical conduct, ii) ensure that all staff are aware of it, and iii) make the code publicly available. An authority’s code of ethical conduct must set expectations that people who work for the authority should act in accordance with a duty of candour in matters relating to their work.
Importantly, unlike the Chapter One, no criminal sanctions are attached to the breach of the Chapter Two and it is public authorities themselves that are responsible for implementing and policing their own code of ethical conduct.
3) Misleading the Public (Chapter Three) — Chapter Three of the Bill creates a new criminal offence — ‘Misleading the Public’. Both public authorities and officials may be liable for this offence if they, acting in their official role, act with the intention of misleading the public or are reckless as to whether their act will do so. In addition, they must also know — or reasonably be expected to know — that what they are doing is seriously improper. Whether an act or an omission is ‘seriously improper’ is ultimately an objective determination to be made by a jury on a case-by-case basis taking into account all the circumstances of the case. But, it must meet three key criteria: i) involve significant or repeated dishonesty on a matter of real public concern; ii) cause or risk causing harm; and iii) amount to a clear departure from the standards expected in the proper exercise of public office.
4) Replacement of Misconduct in Public Office (Part 3) — Part 3 of the Bill seeks to abolish the current common law offences of ‘Misconduct in Public Office’ and replace them with two new statutory offences — 1) ‘seriously improper acts’ and 2) ’breach of duty to prevent death or serious injury’. Both offences can only be committed by ‘public office holders’. I have detailed the specifics of these two new offences elsewhere, but it is important here to note that prosecution under either offence would require the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions.
5) Parity of Representation (Part 4) — Part 4 amends the current legal aid funding regime to achieve ‘Parity of Representation’ between all parties during inquiries and inquests. Currently, limitations in legal aid funding create a lack of parity between parties, leaving the state’s position disproportionately strong compared with that of bereaved families. Part 4 of the Bill aims to tackle this in two key ways: a) it makes more legal aid funding available for bereaved families and b) it changes the rules around the conduct of the State’s legal representatives at inquests.
Taken together, these five key legislative initiatives are intended to give effect to the Government’s stated aims and objectives — changing the culture of concealment within state authorities, both to prevent the wrongdoing and cover-ups that have characterised previous national scandals and to ensure greater transparency and candour when such events do occur, including during subsequent inquiry and inquest proceedings.
The Bill’s Legislative Journey (so far!)
Although the Bill has now moved through all of its Commons stages, its legislative journey has been far from straight forward.
Even before the Bill’s introduction, the Starmer government was heavily criticised by campaigners for failing to include ‘key demands’ in early legislative drafts. Early drafts were watered down to such an extent that the Bill failed to include the term ‘duty of candour’ altogether. This was due, seemingly, to fears within the Civil Service that ‘a new duty of candour that introduced criminal sanctions to any instance of dishonesty by the 14 million people employed by UK public bodies would be impractical’.
Campaigners, and bereaved families, however, pushed back and demanded an ‘all-or-nothing’ approach. As I explained at the time, these early disagreements resulted in the Bill’s introduction being ‘paused’ and, consequently, Starmer breaking the promise he had made to introduce the legislation to Parliament by the 36th anniversary of the Hillsborough Disaster. Eventually, due to the fear of losing the support of the Hillsborough families, his government repented and introduced a revised Bill.
Following the Bill’s introduction to the Commons, it faced further delays due to a significant disagreement about how its provisions would apply to the British security and intelligence services, though. In its original form, the Bill contained a ‘blanket exemption’ for security and intelligence officers from the Duty of Candour and Assistance contained in Chapter One of the Bill now, justified on the basis of ‘national security’. In practice, this meant that, unlike all other public officials and authorities, the security services would not be subject to the obligation to ‘act with candour, transparency and frankness in their dealings with inquiries and investigations’. This exemption faced significant criticism from campaigners, particularly in light of recent high-profile examples of senior security service officials providing false evidence and running false narratives during statutory inquiries, including in the Manchester Arena Inquiry, and other investigations.
Due to these disagreements, campaigners, ministers and the security services reached an impasse before the Bill’s Report Stage and, consequently, the then-government formally paused the Bill’s passage in January 2026. Finally, after months of negotiations, amendments to the Bill were agreed in July 2026 to remove the security services’ blanket exemption. Rather than providing a blanket exemption, the amendment instead requires the security services to make a specific application to the court if they seek a legal exemption for reasons of ‘national security’.
These two incidents of delay are particularly interesting for one reason — the Bill faced significant opposition from those authorities and institutions to whom its provisions will apply. It is also the behaviour and culture within those same institutions that the Bill ultimately seeks to change. Putting it flippantly, expecting public authorities and bodies to willingly embrace legislation designed to constrain their own conduct requires somewhat of a ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’ thinking. It is perhaps, therefore, unsurprising that the Bill faced such fierce opposition. The episodes also highlights the importance of the role played by campaigners, particularly the Hillsborough families. If not for their determination and tenacity, the Bill would likely have been ‘watered down’ during its parliamentary passage.
Given the level of opposition that the Bill has already faced from parts of the public sector, the question has to be asked: can the Hillsborough Law ultimately succeed in achieving the widespread cultural change it seeks to deliver?
What challenges will the Hillsborough Law face?
Perhaps the most obvious point to be made here is that achieving meaningful culture change takes significant time. It also requires a sustained willingness on the part of those that it affects – in this case the wider state machinery – to ‘buy in’ to the cultural change it seeks to achieve. Officials ultimately have to not only understand what the duty of candour requires, but why it is necessary at all. As the above evidences, this may be particularly challenging given the potential for institutional self-interest within the state when it comes to a law of this nature.
Legally speaking, there is one notable aspect of the current Bill that may undermine its cultural purpose. Unlike the Duty of Candour and Assistance contained in Chapter One, which is legally binding and backed by criminal sanctions, the General Duty of Candour contained in Chapter Two does not create a freestanding, legally binding duty of candour, nor is it backed by criminal sanctions. Although Chapter Two does impose a binding legal duty on public authorities, this duty is confined to ‘ethical conduct’, requiring authorities to adopt a code of ethical conduct ‘which sets standards of conduct expected of people who work for the authority’. Accordingly, the Bill essentially permits public authorities to define and ‘self-police’ the candour and ethical conduct of its employees.
This inconsistency in the architecture of the Bill, in fact, was identified by Jim Allister MP during the Bill’s Second Reading:
There are issues with the Bill that I want to probe. It declares in its very first clause that: ‘The purpose of this Act is to ensure that public authorities and public officials at all times perform their functions…(a) with candour, transparency and frankness, and (b) in the public interest’. But will it be at all times? We discover in the Bill that the only criminal sanction applies to those who do not show candour, transparency and frankness to a public inquiry or a public investigation.
Given that, as Justin Madders MP noted, state institutions often “act defensively, obfuscate and focus on protecting themselves when placed under scrutiny”, the likelihood of public authorities failing to self-regulate is high. Therefore, without the threat of criminal sanctions to ensure compliance, the current drafting of Chapter Two potentially jeopardies the Bill’s ability to achieve widespread, meaningful culture change within public authorities and institutions.
Indeed, it will be interesting to see if any Peers recognise this architectural inconsistency during the Bill’s passage through the Lords and consequently table amendments in the hope of improving this aspect of the Bill.
Concluding remarks
Clearly, it is too early to predict the long-term success of the Hillsborough Law. However, there is one relevant contextual factor that I am yet to mention in this blog — the change in Prime Minister. As the original sponsor of the 2017 Private Member’s Bill, upon which the current draft is based – and his long-term support for the introduction of the Hillsborough Law – may provide the Bill with greater political capital as it enters the Lords. It may, as a result of this, be less susceptible to the attempts of hostile opposition to dilute its contents and, perhaps, strengthen those aspects of the Bill (outlined above) which potentially jeopardise its cultural ambitions.
Kate Dewsnip.
Some of the research underpinning this blog, including the analysis of the General Duty of Candour in Chapter Two of the Bill, was conducted during my time as a Research Assistant at the AHRC-funded Centre for People’s Justice, University of Liverpool. The views expressed in this blog are my own.
Kate is a Graduate Teaching Fellow and PhD candidate at the University of Liverpool School of Law and Social Justice. She is a contributing writer for the Constitution Society.
The Constitution Society is committed to the promotion of informed debate and is politically impartial. Any views expressed in this article are the personal views of the author and not those of The Constitution Society.