My Lords, I share the mood of this House about the tragedy of Hillsborough. I pay tribute all those who have spoken so movingly and with great sensitivity about the long suffering that it has caused. They have drawn, rightly, on their own experiences.
Surely the very least we can expect of all of us and of all public servants, elected and unelected, is that we should tell the truth to an inquiry. That should be a minimum requirement or expectation. Surely we should go further and expect all public officials facing an inquiry to collaborate willingly, to offer information and to share the relevant papers, rather than seeing it as a defensive measure they have to take to protect themselves and their small part of the public sector from proper scrutiny. They should want to get to the bottom of it to learn from the experience. How do you run a good organisation? You learn from your mistakes, as well as reinforcing your successes.
I want to concentrate, in my brief remarks, on how important a properly enforced and widely accepted and adopted duty of candour is throughout the public sector to avoid another series of chapters of disasters of the kinds we unfortunately have to review today—everything from bad blood to the Grenfell fire, the Hillsborough disaster and the Post Office mugging some of its best employees. If we could get the public sector to adopt that more widely we would start to intercept problems early and avoid them getting out of control, and we would succeed in stopping some problems ever emerging. There are many good public officials who already do that automatically and do not need to be told, but clearly there are not enough, because we have seen too many tragedies coming from too many different parts of the public sector.
I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, who led a small group of us MPs in the Commons some years ago. We were quite convinced that the sub-postmasters were being wronged and that Post Office senior management was doing bad things by not understanding that the fault was from a computer and not from the people. I remember asking a succession of Ministers at the time, “Is it likely that, suddenly, a lot of your best managers, who have been honest and running good businesses for many years, would all become crooks at the same time? Would they become such incompetent crooks that it would all show up in the accounts and the computer runs as soon as they took the money off the Post Office?” It was completely nonsensical, yet we were not able to get this simple point across to Ministers taking briefs from the Post Office and from senior executives who were working with lawyers, so they lived the lie and tried to persuade us of something that was patently absurd.
This is not just history; the Post Office tragedy goes on because many of the things are still not being fixed. There are still sub-postmasters whose reputations have not been rehabilitated properly or publicly enough, so I say to the Government: get on with it. There are still sub-postmasters who have not received their compensation. Successive Governments have failed. Again, the Government must get on with it. If we are to make any sense of this new spirit embodied in a Bill that has a very welcome aim then these things need fixing now.
Let us take the case of the British Steel workers in Scunthorpe. The Government recently nationalised British Steel. They have led the public and, I presume, the workers in Scunthorpe to believe that the main purpose is to save the jobs of those working at the blast furnaces there. Will that actually be the case? Do we have enough candour here? We also know that the Government think that blast furnaces should be replaced with electric arc furnaces and that there used to be plans to do that for Scunthorpe. We also know that, if that happened, there would be a very big loss of jobs because far fewer workers are needed in an electric arc furnace plant than in a blast furnace plant.
Let us have some candour from the Government. If they are genuinely going to preserve these jobs for many years then that would be very good news for the workforce, but can they guarantee that? Let us have some candour for the taxpayers. How much will that cost? Apparently, British Steel is losing £1.3 million a day. For how many more days and years can you go on losing that amount of money? Is there a plan—we still have not been told the plan—that would reduce those losses while preserving all those jobs? These are the kinds of things that a Government need to get right if they are to persuade people in favour of more nationalisation and that a doctrine of candour can actually work.
Let us take the railways. There have been a couple of unfortunate crashes over the summer. I presume that Network Rail and those involved looked quickly at what had gone wrong, because if something really bad had gone wrong that could repeat itself then they would have had to shut down other parts of the network, which they did not do. However, we did not have any candour at the time about why those people had been injured and why two people had died. Should we not have more candour about that? Now that the railway is becoming fully nationalised, why do not we get a debate into the issue of why you do not get a seat belt on an intercity or express train? The crash investigations usually reveal that most of the serious injuries and deaths are caused by people being flung out of their seats into hard surfaces and sharp surfaces, or thrown against windows. That is what causes the real damage to people.
I say this to the Government. I love the idea of candour and honesty; it is the only way to run things well. You need to be honest as soon as something starts to go wrong. You need to share it with people. You have to come to the House of Commons or the House of Lords and say, “This has gone wrong, but we know the fix, and this is what we’re going to do”. That is not happening in enough cases. The Government, who want more nationalisation, should particularly look to the nationalised industries. As someone who has thought and written a bit about them, I find that it is becoming fashionable again, but please get it right.