20/07/2026
**A law to end the cover-ups. And the one they're ignoring.**
This week, Parliament voted to end what they describe as the culture of institutional cover-up.
.. while it is already legislating to hide one.
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Andy Burnham: "I hope it ends the cover-up culture that has failed so many ordinary people in this country. We can never forget that for 20 years an entire English city was crying 'Injustice!' correctly, yet this place ignored those people."
Ed Davey: "All too often, when things have gone wrong, we have seen a tendency to cover up mistakes, to close ranks, to protect institutions and, so often, to lie."
Extracts from House of Commons, third reading of the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, 14 July 2026.
Yes. They are right.
As we have repeatedly described this year, under pressure, we are witnessing Public Services that are moving to protect themselves. And weaponise against those they are duty-bound to protect. And it is that which makes what follows so hard to fathom.
Because this week, in UK Parliament, MPs and Ministers alike showed us they actually already accept the reality. They accept that services under pressure behave badly. Sometimes unlawfully. That it causes serious harm. At worst, avoidable deaths. It is set out in their *own* consultation, their *own* Inquiries, conceded in their *own* correspondence, and now, spoken from the despatch box.
And yet these same Ministers are turning away, knowing that they are simultaneously instructing their teams to prepare new legislation that make that harm harder to see. And impossible to correct. In many cases, invisible.
And that is the part that should stop everyone.
It is unconscionable that a government can hold both positions at once: that the state, under pressure, breaks the law and damages the people it exists to protect... and that the answer, at least in the case of some of the most vulnerable, is to actively strip away the means of catching it.
Despite public outrage.
Despite overwhelming evidence of the harm this will inflict.
Despite near universal condemnation by all of those actively working to protect the interests of vulnerable children and their families against the harm being inflicted on them, right now, by the state.
It sounds stark. Because it is.
Worse still, this is not a static failure. It is not neglect. It is direction. This Government, is knowingly allowing the Department for Education to bring forward legislation to wash away the very safeguards that have made their unlawful conduct visible: the tribunal, the EHCP, the statutory duties frustrated, ignored, and wilfully obstructed. For a decade. The only instruments that turn a family's experience into a finding the state cannot ignore. A manoeuvre relentlessly lobbied for by Local Authorities across the UK, shamelessly characterising 'SEND' as an 'existential crisis' to their budgets, and blaming the very unreasonableness of a system that allowed a Judge to determine what was in a child's best interest.
At the cost of their bottom-line.
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In 2017, the state was warned. Bishop James Jones, the government's own adviser on Hillsborough, infamously named the failure: "the patronising disposition of unaccountable power." He said it was a culture, not a list of bad acts, and that it would not be shifted by changes in policy and process.
Culture indeed. Never a truer word spoken.
And yet this disposition he named is not history.
It is operating right now, like a festering virus, deeply embedded within the SEND system. We have now received over 1,800 detailed testimonies of serious maladminstration and misconduct, and more every day. 142 named authorities. And a serving council officer told ITV this month that obstruction of disabled children's lawful entitlements is, at least in some instances, done as a matter of instruction.
Not strain. Instruction.
So when the Secretary of State boldly calls the lawyers who hold the state to account a "vested interest,", perhaps we should all pause for a moment to ask the question the label is designed to stop.
Whose interest, exactly, is served by removing judicial oversight from the state?
Not the child, who loses the only route by which the law bites. The only route which *always* provides the support the law requires. In some case- support that saves their life.
No. Just the institution that never wants to be told, by anyone it cannot overrule, that it broke the law. The institution that seeks complete impunity.
So this Parliament unanimously voted to pass a law to 'end the cover-up'.
… and yet, the next one is already documented, systemic, and serious. The evidence is already filling their inboxes. And so... still, we wait, while watching what may sadly prove to be hollow, self congratulatory words about a return of ethics to the heart of Public Service.
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On Monday, Andy Burnham, MP takes up the leadership. With it comes the power to decide whether the words spoken this week were, in fact, a principle or a performance.
Keir Starmer will now call the Hillsborough Law his legacy. But a law is only a legacy if it is used. And the generation it must protect, sadly, is not only the one that died at Hillsborough. For them, it came too late.
This law must be used to protect those being failed by dysfunctional public services, right now. In classrooms and tribunals, in homes and in hospitals. Wilfully, knowingly obstructed from support by public officers who sit in council offices: vulnerable children with special educational needs, illegally being denied en-masse what the law already owes them.
While the state looks away.
While families collapse.
While children die.
This is already on course to become the defining social injustice of this generation, and yet it is happening in plain sight, while the ink on the Public Accountability Bill is still wet.
So the question is now simple.
Andy Burnham, MP you said truth and justice do *not* stop here. You said “this place” ignored the calls of an entire city for twenty years, and called it a “…failure that must never be repeated.”
We are telling you now, it *is* being repeated.
Right now.
In front of your eyes.
With the evidence in your inbox.
So we ask you, will you allow this generation of children to become the next twenty-year injustice?
.. Or will you use the law you wrote, and the Office you are about to hold, to stop it while it can still be stopped? What will be your legacy?
Strain is real. Conduct is conduct. And the law is the law.
Measure what Matters
