The Public Office (Accountability) Bill was introduced into the House of Commons on 16 September 2025. It gives effect to the Labour Party’s 2024 Manifesto commitment to introduce a ‘Hillsborough Law’ which will ‘place a legal duty of candour on public servants and authorities and provide legal aid for victims of disasters or state-related deaths’. As the Government’s ‘Duty of Candour Factsheet’, produced to supplement the Bill, explains, the Bill represents ‘a powerful new package of measures to address these failings and others seen at Grenfell Tower, in the infected blood and Horizon scandals – and in too many other examples over too many years’.

The preamble to the Bill explains that its purpose is to: 

“Impose a duty on public authorities and public officials to act with candour, transparency and frankness; to make provision for the enforcement of that duty in their dealings with inquiries and investigations; to require public authorities to promote and take steps to maintain ethical conduct within all parts of the authority; to create an offence in relation to public authorities and public officials who mislead the public; to create further offences in relation to the misconduct of persons who hold public office and to abolish the common law offence of misconduct in public office; to make provision enabling persons to participate at inquiries and investigations where the conduct of public authorities may be in issue; and for connected purposes.”

Accordingly, the Bill contains several distinctive provisions, each geared towards improving the integrity of public authority participation in investigations and inquiries. A principal feature of the Bill is the creation of the ‘duty of candour and assistance’. This blog post considers this statutory duty, placing it in the context of the pre-existing public law protections surrounding candour and disclosure. 

The Duty of Candour and Assistance 

Under the duty of candour and assistance, public authorities and public officials must ‘at all times act with candour, transparency and frankness in their dealings with inquiries and investigations’ (Section 2(1)). They must comply with the duty expeditiously, and without favour to their own position or that of another person (Section 2(6)). The duty applies to coroner’s investigations, and both statutory and non-statutory inquiries (Section 23(2)). The Bill also empowers Ministers to make consequential provision through the creation of secondary legislation, through which the remit of the duty may also be extended (Section 21). 

The duty of candour and assistance attaches to public authorities and officials and can also apply to those other than public authorities and public officials where such persons ‘had a relevant public responsibility in connection with an incident’ (Section 4(1)). ‘Relevant public responsibility’ is defined in the Bill, and includes a health and safety responsibility, or circumstances in which the person carried out activities as a service provider to a public authority (Section 4(2), Section 4(3)). The Bill also applies to intelligence services as it applies to other public authorities, although there are some qualifications on the extent of this duty which are particularised in Section 6.

Clarification on the contents of the duty of candour and assistance is contained within Section 2 of the Bill. The overarching duty includes a duty to notify the person leading an inquiry or investigation in circumstances where the authority or official has grounds to believe that their acts are or may be relevant to, or they have information likely to be relevant to, that inquiry or investigation (Section 2(3)). Section 2(4) details that the public authority or official must provide all such assistance as they can reasonably give, including providing a position statement, correcting errors or omissions, and drawing attention to particularly significant information.  Where a public authority is subject to those obligations, the public official who is in charge of that authority must take all reasonable steps to ensure that the authority complies with those obligations (Section 2(5)). 

Although the primary focus of the Bill is the proactive disclosure by individuals (for instance, through the duty to notify those leading an investigation contained in Section 2(3)), those leading inquiries and investigations may, under the framework imposed by the Bill, require a public authority or a public official to provide information (Section 3(5)). 

The Bill makes it an offence to fail to comply with the duty of candour and assistance in respect of an inquiry or investigation (Section 5). A person will have committed an offence under the Bill where they intend that their failure will impede the inquiry or investigation from achieving its objectives, or, with respect to a failure to comply with Section 2(4) or Section 2(5), are reckless as to whether it will do so. A person who commits this offence is liable to imprisonment or a fine (or both). Where the conviction is on indictment, the maximum term of imprisonment is two years (Section 5(2)(d)). 

What does this Bill add to the existing public law disclosure and transparency framework?

Public law already has a disclosure and transparency framework. This is a piecemeal framework, composed of both common law duties such as the common law duty of candour in judicial review, and statutory duties such as the Freedom of Information Act 2000. The introduction of the duty of candour and assistance through the Public Office (Accountability) Bill adds to this landscape in two meaningful ways. First, this duty generally applies earlier in time than other equivalent public law duties, because it is engaged once an authority or official has reason to believe that information will be relevant to an investigation or inquiry (as opposed to, for instance, once information is specifically requested from that public authority under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 or the Inquiries Act 2005). Second, it regularises and unifies the pre-existing duties by creating a general duty which applies in the same way to different types of inquiries and investigations. 

Earlier candour

In general, the duty of candour and assistance applies earlier in time than other public law disclosure mechanisms. Whilst a request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 may be submitted at any time, other disclosure mechanisms ‘bite’ later in time than the duty of candour and assistance. 

For example, statutory public inquiries have a specific disclosure and transparency mechanism, contained within the Inquiries Act 2005. Section 21 of the Act, discussed more fully here, gives the Chair of an Inquiry the power to compel testimony and disclosure. This includes requiring a person to attend to give evidence (s.21(1)), or to provide written or documentary evidence (s.21(2)). This is supplemented by Rule 9 of the Inquiry Rules 2006, which empowers the inquiry panel to make written requests for evidence ‘to any person that it wishes to produce any document or any other thing’ (Rule 9(2)). 

Because the framework under the 2005 Act applies within the context of an existing inquiry (which usually means that the inquiry is at the evidence stage), the duty of candour and assistance will typically attach earlier in time. This is because, under Section 2(3), the duty to notify arises when an authority or official has grounds to believe that their acts, or information that they have, is or may be relevant to an inquiry, and this could occur as early as the time at which the announcement of the inquiry or investigation is made. Further, the framework under the Inquiries Act 2005 depends upon a request being made (i.e. through the service of a Section 21 notice). The duty of candour and assistance is a proactive duty which does not depend upon the public authority being ‘asked the right questions’. This circumvents the process of notification and response, which may result in faster disclosure.  

The new duty is also likely to result in earlier disclosure than under the common law duty of candour in judicial review. Whilst the duty of candour and assistance under the Bill is not explicitly concerned with judicial review, judicial review proceedings often run concurrently with inquests and inquiries, and on occasion, have been used to challenge them (see for instance R (Cabinet Office) v The Chair of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry [2023] EWHC 1702 (Admin) which involved a judicial review challenge to a notice served under Section 21 of the Inquiries Act 2005). Public authorities and officials are already subject to the common law duty of candour in judicial review, which attaches as soon as a public authority is aware that someone is likely to test a decision or action affecting them. The duty of candour and assistance mirrors the common law duty of candour in this regard, by attaching where the authority or official has grounds to believe that their acts are or may be relevant to, or they have information likely to be relevant to, an inquiry or investigation. Importantly, it attaches outside of the confines of anticipated, or ongoing, public law litigation. Consequently, it may ‘bite’ earlier than the common law duty of candour, in circumstances in which an investigation or inquiry appears to be likely, but litigation from affected individuals does not (for instance, where failings on the part of a public authority are not known publicly, even to prospective claimants, or where judicial review is otherwise not undertaken or unlikely to occur). 

The duty of candour and assistance, by attaching earlier in time than these duties, has the potential to streamline state accountability processes. For instance, a public authority being forthcoming with disclosure from the moment that the topic of a public inquiry is identified may mean that the terms of reference of that inquiry can be drawn more narrowly and specifically. This could in turn reduce public expenditure on inquiries and inquests by making them shorter and more effective. Moreover, the application of the duty to investigations which are internal could be transformative in resolving some state failures at the internal stage, once they are first identified. In some instances, this may mean that a later public inquiry is not necessary. 

Regularising the framework 

As the foregoing has highlighted, there are a number of discrete statutory and common law disclosure frameworks and duties. They apply in particular contexts. As a result, the candour and disclosure obligations which apply to a public authority vary based on the forum of the challenge: a statutory inquiry has a different disclosure framework to that which applies in a non-statutory inquiry, for instance. This is different again to duties such as the common law duty of candour, which only applies in judicial review proceedings, and the Freedom of Information Act 2000. 

The common law duty of candour and assistance applies to both investigations and inquiries (as detailed in Section 23(2)). The Bill regularises the existing framework insofar as it seeks to create a general duty of candour and assistance, capable of attaching to all forums of challenge. Further, the Bill empowers Ministers to make consequential provision via secondary legislation (Section 21), which indicates that in the future other forums of challenge may also benefit from this duty, heightening the regularising and unifying effect that the creation of the duty could have.   

Limitations of the Bill

Although the Bill creates a framework for sanctioning the deletion or amendment of information which is pertinent to an inquiry or investigation, the Bill does not address the risk that data is deleted or otherwise lost between the creation of the data and the engagement of the duty. Public authorities have transitioned to increasingly digitalised modes of working, which risks the mass deletion of information held in certain formats. The deletion of relevant information has already hampered investigations and inquiries such as the COVID-19 inquiry. Recent cases on the common law duty of candour such as R (HM, MA and KH) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2022] EWHC 695 (Admin) (discussed here) have highlighted poor record-keeping practices within certain governmental departments, and the inevitable impact that such practices have on the ability of a defendant to a judicial review to produce the necessary information. These problems appear likely to impact compliance with the duty of candour and assistance as well. 

As the Institute for Government has written of the new duty of candour set out in the Bill, ‘it is impossible to legislate for cultural change’. Amidst a political climate of pre-emptive deletion and poor record retention, one challenge which remains unaddressed by the Bill is that a disclosure and cooperation mechanism alone cannot combat the problem of missing records. Litigation on the interpretation of the Public Records Act 1958, for instance, has cast light on the comparatively weak legal framework surrounding data retention. For the duty of candour and assistance to operate fully, it must first be possible for the public authority or official to disclose all relevant material. 

Conclusion 

The duty of candour and assistance undoubtedly strengthens the disclosure mechanisms surrounding investigations and inquiries. This duty, strengthened by a criminal sanction framework, is likely to transform public authority compliance with accountability mechanisms. Whilst this blog post has primarily focussed on the duty of candour and assistance, other provisions of the Bill, such as the creation of the offence of misleading the public, appear promising for improving public authority transparency. However, disclosure does not exist in a vacuum: for the disclosure mechanisms set forth in the Bill to be effective, they must be accompanied by a renewed effort to retain and protect records.

The author would like to thank the editorial team for their helpful suggestions. 

Cassandra Somers-Joce, Non-Stipendiary Lecturer in Law, Balliol College, Visiting Lecturer in Public Law, King’s College London.

(Suggested citation: C. Somers-Joce, ‘A New Chapter for Governmental Candour? The Public Office (Accountability) Bill’, U.K. Const. L. Blog (6th October 2025) (available at https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/))