Jeremy Wright MP: speeches

Speeches

• 14 Jul 2026 · Public Office (Accountability) Bill · Hansard source

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  It is a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Widnes and Halewood (Derek Twigg), my colleague on the Intelligence and Security Committee. I agree with everything that he has said. It is important to begin by recognising the remarkable determination of everyone who has sought to translate immense personal pain into an improvement in the way in which the state treats its citizens. That applies to the families who have campaigned so hard and to Members of this House who have applied their own determination to that task. As the hon. Member for Widnes and Halewood and many who have spoken in this debate have said, the obstacle to delivering this legislation has really very clearly been the extent to which the duty of candour should apply to the intelligence services and to others for whom full candour may be inconsistent with professional duties, as well as the additional safeguards and modifications that would need to apply to the Bill to enable it to safely cover such people without preventing them from doing their vital work effectively. As the hon. Gentleman said, the Government asked members of the Intelligence and Security Committee, including me, to become involved in the process of resolving that challenge. As the House would expect, we engaged with that process as diligently as we could, with no partisan politics, in an effort to make good law in the pursuit of greater state transparency while preserving our national security equities. As the hon. Gentleman will recall, we spent many hours on the task, engaging with both the Government and those representing the Hillsborough families. It probably would not be right or practical, in the time available, to go into the detail of all the positions taken over many months, but it is fair and important to say that throughout that time, those representing the Hillsborough families have maintained that measures and protections in existing law would prevent national security from being jeopardised if the duty of candour applied to the intelligence services. The Government, for their part, have maintained throughout this period of many months both consistently and robustly that that is not so. The Government have maintained that the only way to protect national security is to build additional safeguards, protections and exemptions into the Bill. That appeared still to be their position until very recently. Even yesterday, Government amendment 147, which gives the head of an intelligence agency the right to withhold information altogether in certain circumstances, appeared in the amendment paper for the Bill, as it had done in many previous iterations of that document. In today’s version of the amendment paper, for the first time, that amendment has disappeared and been replaced not with the detailed compromise that Intelligence and Security Committee members, who have been engaged with this process, have been working towards, along with many others, but with Government amendment 157. Government amendment 157 says, in effect, that protections already existing in the law are good enough after all—the Minister made that clear in what she said—and that no substitute further protections or exemptions need to be built into the Bill. That is a remarkable change of position, and a remarkably fast one. It is up to the Government to decide what legislation they propose to this House, and it is perfectly within their rights to propose amendments to their own legislation. We can all cynically speculate about the reasons why this sudden about-turn has taken place this week, but, as my hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy), who spoke from the Front Bench, said earlier, it is our job to scrutinise this legislation and to ensure that whatever we put in place does justice to the determination of the Hillsborough families and everybody else to put in place a law that does not just sound good, but does good—makes real change and sticks in that task. I simply have to observe to the Minister and the House that, after all the painstaking work and hours spent, until late last week, on the basis that further safeguards were required—all the amendments drafted, redrafted and redrafted again—the Government have suddenly said that none of that is necessary. What on earth is going on? It seems to me that there are two possibilities. The first is that, for whatever reason, the Government have now cobbled together a rushed compromise that does not adequately protect our national security and that, inevitably and logically, does the job less effectively than their previous amendments sought to do. The Minister has been very clear that that is not the case. I want to take her at her word, because this is an important subject. That leaves us with the second possibility, which is that the settlement before us—a settlement that effectively replicates what the advocates for the Hillsborough families have been saying for months—could have been delivered to this House a very long time ago. That needless delay has brought a waste of ministerial time, official time, the ISC’s time, frankly, and the time of the intelligence agencies. That time could certainly have been better spent. But, far, far worse than any of that, it has brought an additional, agonising wait for the Hillsborough families and others for the law that they were promised—an additional wait that, it seems, they did not need to endure. I appreciate that the Minister has come to this matter reasonably late, but, whatever else she may need to answer, I am afraid she needs to explain all that to us and to the Hillsborough families.