Disaster expert explains how Hillsborough law will affect Duty of Candour in public offices

The Public Office Accountability Bill (Hillsborough Law) has currently been postponed by parliament at its report stage while further amendments are made in relation to how duty of candour will affect the intelligent services.

Lucy Easthope is a disaster recovery expert and author of When the Dust Settles. She spoke about the potential shortcomings of the Hillsborough law, how the recent discussions on Candour are encouraging and how it is is still going to be difficult to enforce even with the new legislation.

She began by talking about civil servants and her worries for how they will cope with the new legislation.

“Civil services are going to struggle with it much more than I think they realise because they think that they do not tell lies anymore but that is not my experience. The truth is hidden in other ways; are they going to make it hard to prove that they were not candid?”

“How will it work if I as a responder, know people are lying on day four or five of an incident and that's my lived experience and even from the team drafting the Hillsborough law I still cannot get an answer, and they might say well that is protected by whistleblowing law but that is very difficult to do”

Lucy also spoke about the impact the Hillsborough disaster had on her when she was younger. 

“The children in my class some of them were survivors of Hillsborough. I'm 10 and in year five and you know I've reflected on it a lot because often we think as children we don't know this but straight away I think I was absorbing the anger of my community that they were being lied to but also lied about and that has had a huge effect on the making of me and like I went off to Birkenhead sixth form college and studied law with the direct aim of working in the support of British citizens after disaster which is what I've done ever since.”

Lucy goes on to talk about how these issues are still occurring in cases like Grenfell and the Covid pandemic and her worries that this law will not stop the people affected by disasters being failed.

‘There is a real framing sometimes as the problems being historic, so people talk about it being an issue with Hillsborough which is 1989 and, in the process, afterwards but it is still a problem today.’

“There are much bigger questions about how we want to be in emergency responses and what is acceptable? So, for example, in the the pandemic was discussions about who do you allocate care to? The triage of patients and who gets the ventilators and I think a lot of our planning had assumed those conversations would be very honest and sort of aired on the news and they were not. It became a very difficult conversation, so there is also a citizen responsibility.”

“The hardest personal thing as a responder in this area is working with families and each it's like a conveyor belt at harm and pain and the moment that you are with people when they realise how badly they've been failed and I don't know that I'm ever gonna stop seeing that and I don't know that this law is enough to stop that”

She went on to say that citizens should ask questions about what they want from state and that ‘we can’t just wait for the time of the disaster and then say they lied to us “

She goes on to say ‘because of things like the pandemic … and particularly the post office scandal people are actually the other way now. In the past people look at Hillsborough and go well I don’t like football so that won't be me but now they are thinking hang on you know I could run a small business and be completely shafted like Fujitsu and the government did. I could be in the pandemic and think I am not sure of whether the government is capable of looking after me.’

“If I had posted quite how bad it was pretty obvious things were in February March 2020 people would've been furious with me”

She describes the period immediately after a disaster has taken place as a ‘Churchillian war spirit.’

Lucy has depicted the attitudes of society after a disaster in this graph.

‘Immediately after the incident there is an eight-week honeymoon period and that is an incredibly difficult time to raise concerns, so it is very much not considered the right thing to do to raise questions about the response but often unless you can raise it then the truth is bolted out of the door.’

Easthope went on to say that if it were mandated for questions about planning and response to be asked early it would be harder to hide the truth.

This graph is from Lucy Easthope, Come What May, Hodder and Stoughton. 

By Rebecca Burgess