Tuesday briefing: The law that Hillsborough built – and the bitter final battle to get it through

In today’s newsletter: A new law criminalising public bodies and officials that lie to the British public is expected to complete it final stages in the Commons. Why did it take so long?

Good morning. We think we know this story, the one about the 97 who went to watch a football match on a sunny afternoon. Perhaps you remember, as I do, watching footage of the lethal crush at Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough stadium, on the evening news in your childhood living room. Or maybe you read later how South Yorkshire police presented a series of false narratives that blamed Liverpool football club supporters, rather than take responsibility for their own catastrophic mismanagement of the FA Cup semi-final.

Today, after a decade of campaigning, a new law criminalising public bodies and officials that lie to the British public, and supporting people fighting these authorities for the truth, is expected to complete it final stages in the Commons, pushed through by Keir Starmer as one of his final acts as prime minister.

But why did a law championed by Labour since its time in opposition almost fail? I spoke to David Conn, who has been reporting on Hillsborough for 30 years, about the families’ final battle. First, the headlines.

UK news | British counter-terrorism police are now leading the investigation into the death of Ann Widdecombe in a shock development that has renewed the debate over the security of politicians. A 28-year-old man from Rotherham is being held in custody on suspicion of her murder.

Middle East | The US has launched its third consecutive night of strikes on Iran hours after Donald Trump said Washington would reinstate a maritime blockade on the country and, in an apparently policy reversal, charge ships for safe passage.

UK politics | Andy Burnham is to become Britain’s next prime minister after winning the backing of 349 Labour MPs, including all eligible members of Keir Starmer’s current cabinet, making it impossible for any rival to secure enough nominations to challenge him.

Environment | Most of the UK media stories about the record-breaking heatwave that struck in June failed to mention the climate crisis, analysis has found. Even fewer pieces drew a link between the heatwave and government policies designed to tackle the climate crisis.

US news | The US government has already paid back tens of billions of dollars in tariffs it collected before the supreme court ruled them illegal, according to budget figures released on Monday.

In 2016, the conclusions of the second inquest into the Hillsborough deaths at last fully vindicated the families. A jury found that those who died were unlawfully killed due to gross negligence manslaughter by match commander chief superintendent David Duckenfield and that no behaviour by Liverpool supporters contributed to the disaster. The 97th victim, Andrew Devine, died in 2021 of injuries sustained in the crush. (Later, Duckenfield was found not guilty of gross negligence manslaughter, one of a number of unsuccessful individual criminal prosecutions.)

“Immediately after, the families adopted the Hillsborough law as their positive legacy from the ordeal they had suffered,” David explains. “They wanted a duty of candour for public officials and authorities to be introduced and equality of funding for legal representation for people fighting for justice like them.” At the first inquest, families received no public funding for legal representation, while senior police officers and other public bodies had state-funded legal teams.

A law in this vein was first proposed as a private member’s bill by stalwart advocate of the cause Andy Burnham in 2017, when he was a Labour MP, but languished during the Tory administration. When Labour was elected in 2024, expectations were high: the Hillsborough law was a defining manifesto commitment and Keir Starmer was evidently intent on taking ownership of the reforms, which he announced at two party conferences and personally introduced in the Commons.

But by last winter, progress was mired in a bitter and intractable row about how the new law would apply to the security services. The government pulled the bill midway into its passage through parliament, prompting fury from the Hillsborough families.

“It was an extraordinary situation,” says David. “This has always been a Labour cause. They promised to introduce the law: Margaret Aspinal, whose 18-year-old son James died at Hillsborough, made a speech at conference to introduce Starmer. And yet somehow theywere arguing with the families and trying to carve out an exemption for the security services that had only recently been criticised in the Manchester Arena inquiry.”

Taking on the security services

The proposed law means those in public office have a positive duty to assist public inquiries with candour, and those who lie or evade will face prosecution. After concerted briefing from the security services, the government agreed to give security chiefs the final say over what evidence would be put forward to an inquiry. Campaigners were vehemently opposed, arguing this undermined the central purpose of the law by allowing some parts of the state to continue avoiding scrutiny.

David raises the peculiar dissonance between Labour’s promise to introduce the Hillsborough law and action. “It was so odd that this bill had been drafted in 2017, yet when the Labour government came in the law was facing all this resistance.”

But despite patronising briefings suggesting the families were “naive”, or ignorant of national security considerations, a concrete contemporary example bolstered their argument. “At the Manchester Arena inquiry, MI5 was found to have submitted an inaccurate account of intelligence it had relating to the perpetrator of the atrocity,” David says. “The inquiry chair found ultimately that the failure of MI5 to act swiftly on crucial intelligence was a ‘significant missed opportunity’ to take action that might have prevented the Manchester Arena attack in 2017. The Manchester Arena families are part of the coalition with the Hillsborough families , and the campaign has absolutely insisted that the security services had to be included in the law.”

Burnham’s role and Starmer’s legacy

With parliamentary business plans updated late last week to include the bill’s remaining Commons stages today, it is understood that the final sticking point – that any decisions on excluding evidence on the grounds of national security are for an inquiry chair to make- have been resolved to the families’ satisfaction.
“This has finally been agreed in Starmer’s final week, it also clearly appears significant that Burnham, the Hillsborough families’ long-term supporter, is about to become prime minister.”
Many of the profiles of the incoming prime minister churned out in recent weeks have highlighted the moment Burnham’s speech at the 20th-anniversary memorial service at Anfield in April 2009 was drowned out by chants of “justice for the 96”. “But I don’t think the reporting has fully taken into account how effective he was after that,” says David.

Burnham’s subsequent call for the disclosure of all related documents led to the establishment of the Hillsborough Independent Panel. Its 2012 report exposed the extent of police efforts to falsely blame Liverpool supporters for the disaster, and ultimately led to the quashing of the first inquest’s verdict of accidental death in December of that year. David links this commitment to those campaigning without redress for decades to Burnham’s later work on the infected blood scandal, as well as supporting calls for an inquiry into the policing by the South Yorkshire force (them again) at Orgreave during the miners’ strike.

Given the debate about whether Burnham is a good-vibes-only candidate, it’s worth registering that he brings a shovel when there’s spade work to be done. And