Written by UK legal system – public accountability – legislative tracker
The Public Office (Accountability) Bill – the “Hillsborough Law” – has completed its passage through the House of Commons and is now before the House of Lords. It is not yet law. This tracker explains where the Bill stands, what the statutory duty of candour would actually require, the offences behind it, the funding provisions for bereaved families at inquests, and the criticisms levelled at the Bill on its way through Parliament.
Snapshot
The Bill would place public authorities and public officials under a statutory duty of candour and assistance when dealing with inquiries, inquests and other investigations, backed by criminal offences, and would expand non-means-tested legal aid for bereaved families at inquests where a public authority is an interested person. It has cross-party support in principle, but its passage has been slowed by disagreement over how the duty should apply to the security and intelligence services, and campaigners say key provisions still need strengthening in the Lords.
Where the Bill stands in September 2026
The Hillsborough Law has been a long time coming. The Hillsborough Independent Panel was established in 2009 and reported in 2012; the fresh inquests that followed concluded in 2016 with verdicts of unlawful killing; and the first “Hillsborough Law” – the Public Authority (Accountability) Bill introduced by Andy Burnham as a private member’s bill – fell when Parliament was dissolved for the 2017 general election. The present Bill is the Government’s version, delivered against a manifesto commitment to place a legal duty of candour on public servants and authorities and to provide legal aid for victims of disasters or state-related deaths.
The Public Office (Accountability) Bill, the Government bill that implements the Hillsborough Law commitment, was introduced in the House of Commons on 16 September 2025. Its journey since has not been quick. It had its Commons second reading on 3 November 2025 and completed Public Bill Committee in December 2025, but it then stalled and had to be carried over into the new session on 27 April 2026. It completed report stage and third reading in the Commons on 14 July 2026, was brought to the Lords as HL Bill 42 on 16 July 2026, and had its Lords second reading on 1 September 2026. Amendment papers are already circulating in the Lords – the running list stood at 7 September 2026 – ahead of committee stage.
Two practical consequences follow. First, the duty of candour is not in force: until the Bill completes its remaining Lords stages, any Commons consideration of Lords amendments, and Royal Assent, nothing in it binds anyone. Second, the text can still change. What follows describes the Bill as brought from the Commons – the version now before the Lords – not the finished statute.
What the duty of candour would require
The Bill opens with a purpose clause: public authorities and public officials should perform their functions in the public interest and with candour, transparency and frankness. The enforceable content sits behind that purpose. Clause 2 creates a duty of candour and assistance owed when interacting with inquiries and investigations. It operates in two stages. First, a public authority or official who has grounds to believe their acts could be relevant, or who holds information likely to be relevant, must proactively notify the person leading the inquiry or investigation. Second, once directed, they must give all the assistance they reasonably can: providing relevant information, drawing attention to what is particularly significant, correcting errors and omissions, and – for a public authority – supplying a position statement. Throughout, they must act expeditiously and without favour to their own position, and the official in charge of an authority must take all reasonable steps to secure its compliance.
The duty applies to statutory inquiries under the Inquiries Act 2005, to non-statutory inquiries established by ministers, and to coroners’ investigations, with their Scottish and Northern Irish equivalents, and there is a power to extend it to other types of investigation by regulations. Clause 4 reaches beyond the state itself: private bodies and individuals who had a health and safety responsibility in connection with the incident, or who provided services to a public authority under contract with a significant impact on the public, can be brought within the duty. A modified regime applies to the intelligence services, Defence Intelligence, the National Crime Agency and police forces exercising counter-terrorism functions, and to “protected information” more broadly. A separate chapter requires every public authority to promote and maintain ethical conduct, including through a code of ethics that covers candour.
Volunteer that your acts or information may be relevant – do not wait to be asked.
Comply with the investigation’s directions: disclose, explain, provide a position statement.
Fix errors and omissions promptly, and act without favour to your own position.
That design matters. The duty is not merely a prohibition on lying when questioned; it is drafted as a proactive, always-on obligation to help an investigation reach the truth, with the head of the authority personally responsible for taking reasonable steps to make the institution comply.
The offences behind the duty
A duty without consequences is an exhortation, and the Bill attaches three sets of criminal teeth. First, clause 5 makes it an offence to fail to comply with the duty of candour and assistance where the failure is intended to impede the inquiry or investigation, or – in the case of the assistance obligations – reckless as to that consequence. On conviction on indictment the maximum sentence is two years’ imprisonment. The threshold is deliberately high: the offence targets obstruction, not honest mistake.
Second, clause 12 creates a freestanding offence of misleading the public. A public authority or official commits it by acting with the intention of misleading the public, or recklessly as to whether their act will do so, where they know or ought to know that the act is seriously improper. This is the provision that answers the Hillsborough families’ central complaint: that false narratives were placed in the public domain and left to stand for decades.
Third, Part 3 abolishes the common law offence of misconduct in public office in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and replaces it with two statutory offences: “seriously improper acts” and “breach of duty to prevent death or serious injury”, applying to a statutory list of public office holders. This follows the Law Commission’s December 2020 report, which found the common law offence – which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment – too ill-defined to keep, and recommended abolition and replacement. The candour offences and the misconduct offences do different work: one polices the truthfulness of the state’s engagement with investigations and the public, the other the seriousness of officials’ underlying conduct.
Parity at inquests: funding for bereaved families
For litigants in person and bereaved families, Part 4 may be the most immediately practical part of the Bill. At present, legal help for an inquest is means- and merits-tested, and legal aid for advocacy at the inquest itself is available only through Exceptional Case Funding – broadly, where it is needed to meet the state’s procedural obligations under Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, or where a wider public interest determination is made. The Bill expands non-means-tested legal aid to bereaved families for inquests in England and Wales wherever a public authority is an interested person, through amendments to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 and the civil legal aid regulations.
The other side of the ledger is a new duty on public authorities to ensure that their own spending on legal advice and representation at inquests is necessary and proportionate, with guidance governing how authorities and their lawyers should conduct themselves at the coroner’s court. The policy target is the “inequality of arms” identified by Bishop James Jones in his report on the Hillsborough families’ experiences: public bodies sparing no expense on their own legal advice and representation while bereaved families were often forced to go without it.
The Government describes the package as the largest expansion of legal aid in a decade. Whether it delivers parity in practice will depend on commencement, on the guidance, and on whether there are enough inquest lawyers willing and able to take the work – questions the Lords will press at committee stage.
The criticisms made during passage
The Bill has cross-party support in principle, but its journey has been contested in detail. According to the House of Lords Library briefing, progress in the Commons was delayed by disagreement about how the provisions would apply to the security and intelligence services; the Government amended the Bill at report stage to address that question, while the Conservatives criticised the scheduling of the Bill and maintained their concern about the security and intelligence provisions. The seven-month gap between committee stage in December 2025 and report stage in July 2026 is the visible footprint of that dispute.
From the other direction, the campaigners who drafted the original Hillsborough Law argue the Bill does not yet go far enough. In their joint second reading briefing, Hillsborough Law Now, INQUEST and JUSTICE pressed three points: the offence of misleading the public, as introduced, imported a “harm” requirement they say would blunt its deterrent effect and should be removed; the duty on a chief officer to take “all reasonable steps” to secure compliance does not make that officer personally responsible for the criminal offence, weakening command responsibility; and the caveats for the security services were drafted as corporate carve-outs that would not bind individual intelligence officers in the way other public officials are bound. The report-stage amendments addressed part of the security question; how far they satisfy the campaign is a live issue for the Lords.
None of this is an argument against the Bill. It is the normal shape of hard legislation: the principle commands assent, and the fight is over the perimeter – who is caught, what triggers the duty, and what happens to those who breach it.
What to watch next
Three things will determine what the Hillsborough Law finally looks like. The first is Lords committee stage, where the amendment papers already tabled will be tested – above all on the security services and on the drafting of the misleading-the-public offence. The second is commencement: the Bill’s duty of candour is drafted to apply to investigations already under way when the Act is passed, not only to those begun afterwards, so the commencement timetable will matter to live inquests and inquiries from day one. The third is the funding machinery: the legal aid expansion and the necessary-and-proportionate duty will only change what happens in coroners’ courts if the regulations, guidance and capacity exist to deliver them.
For readers following a live inquest or inquiry now, the present law still governs: Exceptional Case Funding remains the route to funded advocacy, and the existing powers to compel evidence under the Inquiries Act 2005 and the coroner legislation remain the levers. The Bill, if passed, would raise that floor – it has not yet done so.
Source anchors
These official sources support the framework described above. They evidence the Bill’s content and progress; they do not resolve the contested drafting questions now before the Lords.
The closing point
The Hillsborough families were promised that the state would never again be able to hide behind closed ranks. The Bill now before the Lords would write that promise into statute – a proactive duty of candour, criminal offences behind it, and funding to level the field at inquests. But a Bill is a promise, not a protection. The public lesson is simple: until Royal Assent, the duty of candour remains a standard the state has set for itself on paper, and the fight over its perimeter – the security services, the misleading-the-public offence, the funding machinery – is where its real strength will be decided.
Inquest and inquiry decision point
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