This post was originally published on this site.
Every quarter, in a meeting room with bad biscuits, my team and I sit down and score our suppliers. It is not glamorous work. Delivery against promise, invoice against quote, excuses per annum.
At the bottom of the spreadsheet sits a column, polite but lethal, headed renew. Last month we struck off a firm we had used for nine years. Lovely people, always a pleasure on the phone. They had simply stopped delivering what they said they would, when they said they would, and in business that is the only sentence that matters.
I mention the spreadsheet because this week the Labour Party all but handed Andy Burnham the keys to Downing Street, 322 nominations from 403 MPs, nobody else standing, coronation booked for the 20th. And my first thought was not tax, nor growth, nor what the gilt market would make of it all. My first thought was that the new Prime Minister is about to inherit the worst delivery record in the national ledger, and every business owner in Britain knows exactly which line it is.
Because Westminster, viewed from the customer’s end, is the worst contractor in Britain. It quotes in years, invoices in inquiries and delivers in apologies. And the oldest job in its ledger was booked on 15 April 1989, when 97 Liverpool supporters went to a football match and did not come home, and the state spent the following decades doctoring statements, briefing lies and blaming the bereaved.
I remember, as though it was yesterday, watching Andy Burnham speak at Anfield at the 20th anniversary memorial in April 2009. A Cabinet minister, an Evertonian, sent to represent a Labour government that had managed twelve years in office without lifting a finger on Hillsborough. The Kop interrupted him with a chant of justice for the 96, as the number then stood, and booed him, and he stood there and took every second of it. Then he did something almost unheard of in his trade: he went back to London and acted. Full disclosure of documents. The Hillsborough Independent Panel. The 2012 report, the quashed inquests, the 2016 verdict that the supporters were unlawfully killed. In 2017 he put the first Hillsborough Law before the Commons, and it died on the order paper when the election was called and Manchester claimed him.
Enter Sir Keir Starmer, Arsenal fan and former Director of Public Prosecutions, who stood in Liverpool and promised a Hillsborough Law, with a full duty of candour on public officials, before the 36th anniversary of the disaster. April 2025 came and went without it. The bill limped into Parliament that September, was delayed twice while officials fussed over carve-outs for the intelligence services, and had to be carried over into a new session entirely. As of this week it sits at report stage in the Commons, thirty-seven years after the event it is named for. Score that against any supplier review you like. Delivery against promise: nil.
Business readers will recognise the shape of this. What the families are asking for is not exotic. A statutory duty of candour is merely the standard every director in Britain already lives under. Sign accounts you know to be false and you go to prison. Conceal a fatal defect in your product and the courts, the insurers and the customers will dismantle you, correctly, within the year. The bill’s own fact sheets describe obligations that any well-run plc would simply call Tuesday. Hillsborough, the Post Office, infected blood: each one taught the same lesson, which is that a cover-up always costs more than candour. Dishonesty is not a moral failing that happens to be expensive. It is an expense that happens to be a moral failing.
There is cold commercial logic here too. Investors are already demanding a premium to lend to Britain, partly because nobody quite believes what Westminster says it will do next. A state that legislates for its own honesty, that makes lying to an inquiry a criminal offence, is quietly telling every counterparty on earth that its word has a value. Candour, it turns out, is a growth policy.
I have asked before whether Burnham can win over Britain’s entrepreneurs, and suggested he might profitably borrow Andy Street’s homework on the economy. Both still stand. But his first act should need no focus group and no green paper. Bring the Hillsborough Law back to the floor, whole, unwatered, with no carve-outs for anyone, and pass it before conference season. He was booed at Anfield for a government that would not act. He is now the government.
Do that, and the 97 finally get what the man from the DPP promised them and never delivered. Do that, and when the country next sits down to score its suppliers, Westminster might at last earn something it has not deserved since 1989.
A tick in the renew column.
