The Guardian view on Covid and Hillsborough: families forced the state to face the truth | Editorial

The Covid-19 inquiry’s procurement report and the Hillsborough law are not accidental companions. The same movement of bereaved families, many of the same lawyers and the same ideas connect them. In both cases the movement for justice was driven by ordinary people who refused to let institutions control the account of their own failures. That they both arrived within hours of each other meant that it was a good day for justice.

The inquiry chair, Heather Hallett, found that Britain entered Covid dangerously unprepared, leaving health and care workers without adequate protection and that £10bn of PPE spending was then wasted because of the flawed purchasing arrangements. The result of those failures were avoidable infections and deaths: families such as Naomi Fulop’s believe that inadequate protective equipment allowed the deadly virus to take the lives of vulnerable loved ones.

Naomi Fulop. Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer

The families believe the system institutionalised corruption and cronyism, though Lady Hallett declined to endorse that description. But she confirmed that the Conservative government’s hidden “VIP lane” gave favourable treatment to suppliers with political connections. A criminal investigation means that findings relating to PPE Medpro remain unpublished.

A Covid inquiry came about only because campaigners organised in the tradition of the bereaved Hillsborough families. They fought for 27 years before the second inquest concluded in 2016 that the 96 victims had been unlawfully killed and that Liverpool football club supporters were not to blame. The 97th victim died in 2021. Lady Hallett did not call for a “duty of candour”, but her finding that secrecy persisted past the initial crisis makes the case for one.

It is therefore fitting that MPs approved the long-delayed Hillsborough law, clearing the way for a positive duty to be imposed on public authorities and officials to tell the truth and cooperate proactively with investigations, while giving bereaved families funded legal representation – just like the public bodies ranged against them. The knowledge that decisions must later be fully explained can deter reckless decisions before catastrophe occurs.

The legislation will be part of Sir Keir Starmer’s legacy, despite attempts from within his government to carve out an exemption for the security services recently criticised by the inquiry into the terror attack at Manchester Arena. The bill will still face scrutiny in the Lords. The intelligence compromise matters: independent inquiry chairs, not the agencies under scrutiny, will get powers to decide what national security evidence is withheld.

The moment has added significance because the next prime minister, Andy Burnham, had backed the Hillsborough campaign after being heckled for ministerial inaction. He was a teenager watching his team, Everton, play Aston Villa as, unknown to him, disaster unfolded 90 miles away. It took him 20 years, he says, to find the courage to act. He says the law would dismantle what Bishop James Jones called “the patronising disposition of unaccountable power”. That is the right frame. Hillsborough was not only a policing disaster followed by falsehood; it exposed a state machinery that ignored a city for two decades.

But the truth cannot depend on the arrival of a sympathetic prime minister. The bill’s authors are families, survivors and campaigners who turned suffering into a demand to permanently change the relationship between citizen and state. Today is their victory – but it has been won for all of us.

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