In this open letter, Hacked Off Board Director Mandy Garner urges Prime Minister Andy Burnham to turn his own warnings about the British state’s ‘dangerous’ lack of accountability into action — on the press, the criminal justice system and the public inquiries whose recommendations keep being kicked down the road.

Dear Andy Burnham,

Just before you came into power you rightly identified a major problem with the British state — a ‘dangerous’ lack of accountability. You said: ‘What is it about the British state that it won’t hold people to account?’

You mentioned the slew of public inquiries, from Hillsborough to the infected blood scandal, where campaign groups have had to fight for years — decades even — to get justice, and are still doing so. There are too many to list.

When it comes to press accountability, there have been around a dozen inquiries or government reports on press standards since 1947, with Leveson being just the latest. The overriding theme has been the need for independent press regulation, yet action on this has been dodged by the government for so many years because it is essentially about power. Who holds it and who calls the tune.

It’s all part of the same pattern, which appears to be systemic. A public inquiry is held, the recommendations get kicked down the road, everyone says things have moved on (or that, for instance, in the case of the press, social media is worse — which ignores the close links between media and social media, and is not a good excuse for inaction), another inquiry is held a few years later when something else awful happens, and so it goes on. It’s a long cycle and it has a huge, probably immeasurable, cost in terms of public trust in the institutions that are meant to protect them, with the UK having one of the lowest levels of trust in the press internationally. That has implications for our democracy, but it’s wider than that.

The lack of accountability from the top permeates society. I’ve experienced it personally on several fronts, from the criminal justice system to the press — whether that is the system allowing the person who killed our daughter to avoid coming to court to be sentenced on two occasions, or being put through a restorative justice process that turned out to be just a ruse by the defendant to get earlier release. We were told after two years that he should never have been put forward for it; in the end it didn’t go ahead because he was apparently angry with our daughter for daring to cross the road that he was driving down at high speed, through two red lights and on both sides of the road. He left prison having had ‘victim empathy’ sessions.

He was sentenced to 10 years, but got a third off automatically for pleading guilty and served a half before being released on licence. Having been initially in a closed prison, he petitioned to be moved to an open prison - where he would get day release - at the earliest possible opportunity. This was turned down the first time - just months after he killed my daughter. I put in an appeal and had to relive the whole thing again. I was told he could try again six months later. We were not informed when he did so we could not appeal, despite having new information at that point and a victim liaison officer whose job is, presumably, to liaise with victims. He was granted a move to an open prison, although he was moved back to closed prison months later after he did something on day release [we are not allowed to know what this was]. His father is a human rights barrister and he rang him straight after he killed my daughter. The legal system often feels like an additional punishment for victims.

Generally, in my experience, any complaint to the justice system results in them explaining the thing that you protested about to you again, as if you just didn’t understand it — rather than that you think it is wrong and simply want an apology and some kind of assurance that it won’t happen again. The system seems designed not to give apologies or accept responsibility, but to force you into an endless cycle of appeals until, hopefully, you give up.

If the system doesn’t take responsibility when they have done something wrong, what does that mean for how we interact with each other? Why does the driver in our case continue to blame my daughter? Why does the Daily Mail keep on providing different reasons for why they posted a clearly clickbait video about my daughter’s final moments — and will they do it again to another family, having been given the go-ahead by IPSO? What message does that send to people out with their cameras filming death scenes for social media, as our family liaison officer told us they increasingly do?

Lack of accountability is something that has important knock-on effects. Someone has to set an example, and that example should surely come from the top. Public inquiries should result in action, not in kicking the can down the road because no-one has the courage to do anything to change a system that doesn’t work, or because it is too ‘difficult’. The long-term effects are surely worse. I hope you agree that accountability matters and will do all in your government’s power to stand up for the public. We deserve better.

Yours sincerely,
Mandy Garner