David Conn calls for ‘duty of candour’ for officials ahead of Hillsborough Law
- Reporter of the year David Conn and Mayor Andy Burnham attend memorial lecture of Hillsborough lawyer
- New law will ensure officials ‘tell the truth’ says human rights lawyer
- Featured image credit: Leslie Kerwin
Reporter of the year David Conn has called for a ‘duty of candour’ to be placed on police as campaigners call for a Hillsborough law to be introduced within the year.
Conn was joined by legal experts from Garden Court North Chambers at a memorial lecture in the University of Manchester on Thursday, honouring of Hillsborough barrister Mark George, who represented 22 families following the disaster.
The lecture discussed failures in the legal system in the years after the disaster. Named the UK’s current news reporter of the year, David Conn has spent decades as an investigative journalist for The Guardian, and was among the original wave of reporters who covered Hillsborough from the start.
“What struck me as I’ve reported on the legal processes that happened after the disaster and in recent years, is that we’re brought up to believe that our legal system is the best in the world,” he said.
“The legal system is where people have to go in the worst of circumstances when they’re seeking truth and justice – and clearly here, for these unfortunate people, they didn’t get any of it.”
The Rebuilding Process
His coverage of Hillsborough would become foundational for his later work, The Football Business, released in 1998, a book on the commercialisation of football clubs around the time of the Hillsborough disaster.
He said: “I wanted to write about Hillsborough partly because it’s part of the history of football and how it changed. But I obviously understood that this was a huge injustice that had happened and I wanted to write about that.
“I ended up having a chapter in that book called The Rebuilding Process about the rebuilding of the football grounds that happened as a result of the of government forcing the grounds to become safe and all-seater.
“They were given grants worth up to £200m to help them build the stadiums, and at the same time the Hillsborough families had no money, no public funding for legal representation, and were lost in this nightmare legal system.”
It was in researching this chapter that he first met Phil and Hilda Hammond, whose 14-year-old son Philip was killed in the stadium.
“Phil was the vice-chair of the Hillsborough Family Support Group,” he said. “A wonderful man. [He and Hilda] were wonderful people, a wonderful couple.
”I ended up staying there for three hours, sitting around in the kitchen talking about all these issues, and they really opened my eyes to it. I took so much from that into the book, and even after that, as I made my way in journalism and tried to have other opportunities, I always wanted to to take every possible opportunity to raise the Hillsborough injustice.”
The Anfield speech
Just over a decade later, the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster was marked by a memorial held in the Anfield football ground, with a speech by Andy Burnham, who also spoke at Thursday’s lecture. He said his decision to go through with the Anfield speech was a direct result of Mr Conn’s reporting.
“I was Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, and I received an invite to the 20th anniversary of Hillsborough, and I agonised about whether or not I should go because I didn’t know how I could handle it,” he said.
“I’d been invited by Steve Rotherham, who was then Lord Mayor of Liverpool, with the consent of Margaret Aspinall, the chair of the Hillsborough Family Support Group. She’d made an exception and said they would invite a politician, but I didn’t know what to do.
“I’d been invited, and obviously as somebody born in that city, I kind of felt I had to go. But I didn’t know what I was going to say, because how could I? What could I say, representing a government that had let the city and the people down?
“In that moment, I read an article from David. Days before the 20th anniversary, he laid out this painstaking research he’d done on the statements, and David being David, he was the only person that had gone through, in his meticulous way, line-by-line, every single statement. And he wrote an article in The Guardian in 2009 where he said the statements had been systematically amended.
“It was there that I had a moment of clarity about what I needed to do in relation to the 20th anniversary. I decided to work with my colleague, Maria Eagle, even though we had no cabinet cover for what we were doing. We made a public call via David in The Guardian calling for full disclosure of all the Hillsborough papers to at least give the families the truth.”
New inquiries
A total of 300,000 documents were released following the public call. The Hillsborough Independent Panel was set up to go through the previously unseen evidence, and two years later, would come out with a damning report that led to the original inquests being overturned, and a fresh wave of inquiries being launched.
Though the news was celebrated by families and advocates, Mr Conn’s faith in the legal system remained slim.
Two South Yorkshire police officers and a solicitor were charged with perverting the course of public justice for amending the police statements used in the original inquiry, but were acquitted: the original inquiry was not about public justice, and so they could not be accused of perverting it.
“He [Mr Justice William Davis] notes of solicitors that they must not ‘positively mislead’ a court,” Mr Conn said. “But if they realise the court is acting on a false basis, they have no duty to correct the court. Where is the duty of candour for the lawyers?”
‘A duty of candour’
Imposing a duty of candour on official bodies is the key aim of the Hillsborough Law Now campaign, of which both David Conn and Andy Burnham are vocal supporters. Drafted by human rights barrister Pete Weatherby KC, the campaign was reignited last year when Kier Starmer announced that the law would be delivered before April 2025.
Speaking at the event, Mr Weatherby outlined the scope of the proposed Hillsborough Law: “What it will do is impose a duty of candour: a legal duty to tell the truth.
“What it means is that the chief constable or senior officer will have to sign off on narrative of the start of the investigation about what their narrative of the facts is.
“If that is put forward falsely – wilfully or intentionally falsely – then that will be a criminal offence.
“The Hillsborough Law has the potential to massively rebalance the system. It has the potential not just to force public officials to tell the truth proactively, but it also establishes a level playing field for victims of disasters and outrageous things like this so that people are actually in the room with rights, and with lawyers.”