LONDON – A law intended to prevent police and other officials from covering up errors and wrongdoing was unanimously approved by British lawmakers on Tuesday, 37 years after the country’s deadliest sports tragedy sparked a campaign for justice.
The Public Office (Accountability) Bill — or Hillsborough Law — imposes a legal duty of candor on public officials to tell the truth about public tragedies whatever the impact on their reputation.
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It is named after the 1989 disaster in which 97 Liverpool soccer fans were killed in a crush at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield. An independent inquiry in 2012 found the police had covered up their own mistakes and blamed the deaths on unruly supporters.
The bill completed its passage through the House of Commons after a delay caused by wrangling over whether it would apply to Britain’s spies. After pressure from bereaved families, the government has agreed that the intelligence services will also be covered by the duty of candor, but with a “secure process” for disclosing information if it could affect national security.
The bill will become law after being approved by the House of Lords, Parliament's upper chamber, in the coming weeks.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who promised to bring in the law during his 2024 election campaign, opened the debate on the bill in the Commons in one of his final acts as leader.
He said victims' families “have waited years and years too long” for justice.
Starmer's successor Andy Burnham, who is due to take over as prime minister on Monday, has long campaigned on behalf of the bereaved families.
In his first speech in the Commons since being elected as an MP last month, Burnham said the Hillsborough Law was “a rewiring of the state and a passing of power from the authorities to the hands of ordinary people.”
Paying tribute to Starmer, he said it was happening “because of the prime minister’s commitment to a country based on justice and fairness, and we thank him for that.”
The 54,000-capacity Hillsborough Stadium was nearly full for a FA Cup semifinal match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest on April 15, 1989, when more than 2,000 Liverpool fans poured into a standing-only section behind a goal. Many victims were crushed against metal fences or trampled underfoot, and suffocated.
With hooliganism rife in English soccer in the 1980s, a narrative blaming drunken, ticketless and rowdy Liverpool fans was created by the police, and was only overturned by years of campaigning by bereaved families.
An original inquest in 1991 found the deaths were accidental, a conclusion the victims’ families refused to accept. Those findings were overturned in 2012 after a far-reaching inquiry into the disaster that examined previously secret documents and exposed wrongdoing and mistakes by police.
In 2016, a jury at a second inquest found the victims had been “unlawfully killed” as a result of failings by the police, the ambulance service and Sheffield Wednesday Football Club, which ran the stadium. It found the behavior of fans did not contribute to the deaths.
In 2023 the government apologized for the way the families were treated over the decades and for the delay in its response to the report.
An investigation by the police watchdog concluded last year that 12 officers would have faced gross misconduct proceedings, were they not dead or long retired.
Labour lawmaker Ian Byrne, who was at Hillsborough and survived the tragedy, said he hoped the law would mean “that no grieving family will ever have to come to fight the state simply to uncover the truth.”
“This law is far more than Hillsborough,” he said in an emotional speech. “It is about the kind of country we choose to be, a country where power tells the truth, where public servants serve the public, where justice is not delayed until campaigners grow old, and where no family is ever left to walk alone.”