Students and staff deserve candour over universities and the duty of candour

Three weeks into his return to the Commons after nine years away, he is days from taking over from Keir Starmer as Prime Minister – and was in a full-circle mood:

It does feel tonight like life is coming full circle. As we pass this momentous piece of legislation, a piece of legislation that will change the way this country thinks and works about justice. It truly is a rewiring of the state and a passing of power from the authorities to the hands of ordinary people.

Keir Starmer, in one of his last significant Commons moments as Prime Minister, opened the debate personally – describing the Bill as a delivery of “justice, change and national renewal for the 97.”

The Public Office (Accountability) Bill 2026 – known everywhere else as the Hillsborough Law – now heads to the Lords, where its remaining stages will play out under a new government.

It creates a statutory duty of candour, non-means-tested legal aid for bereaved families at inquests where a public authority is an interested person, and a suite of new criminal offences that replace the common law offence of misconduct in public office.

Universities are big, publicly-funded institutions that hold significant power over the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Does the “rewiring of the state” reach as far as the university gate? Half of it does.

Chapter 1 – probably in

The Bill has two duties in it that matter for the sector, and they’re in different chapters of Part 2.

Chapter 1 is the duty of candour and assistance – the inquest and inquiry duty. It requires public authorities to notify coroners of anything they hold that’s relevant to an investigation, provide position statements, correct errors and omissions as they emerge, act without favour to their own position, and comply with formal compliance directions from coroners and inquiry chairs.

Deliberate or reckless non-compliance is a criminal offence with up to two years in prison. When a student dies and the coroner opens an investigation, the university and its vice chancellor will both be under mandatory compliance directions. Bereaved families will get non-means-tested legal aid on the same terms as families facing the NHS, the police, or the prisons.

For Chapter 1 to kick in, the university needs to be a “public authority” under paragraph 2(1)(k) of Schedule 2 – “any other body” whose functions “are functions of a public nature” or “include functions of a public nature.”

That phrase has decades of Human Rights Act and Freedom of Information Act case law behind it, and it comfortably reaches pre-92 chartered universities and post-92 higher education corporations to the extent of their public functions. VCs and senior staff (and governors, including student ones) are public officials under the same test.

Section 4 also catches contractors – outsourced accommodation providers, counselling services, teaching partners – where they exercise a relevant health and safety responsibility or work under direct contract with significant public impact.

Universities are in for inquests. That’s a proper change, and – on the terms Burnham described this evening – a real rebalancing.

Chapter 2 – probably out

Chapter 2 is the ethical code duty. It requires public authorities to promote and maintain high standards of ethical conduct at all times, to publish a code of ethical conduct anchored in the Nolan principles of selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership, to embed a duty of candour into the code, to set out disciplinary consequences for breach, and to publish whistleblowing routes and complaints handling processes.

The Chapter 2 duty is your everyday one. Most students never see an inquest. They do see their university’s complaints handling, its safeguarding processes, its disciplinary machinery, its academic misconduct panels, its accommodation providers, and its consumer information.

The Chapter 2 duty would require all of that to be done candidly, transparently, and with clear consequences for defensiveness. It is the duty that would tame any reputation-management default. It is the one that would matter most to most students most of the time.

But it doesn’t, at least yet, apply to universities.

Part 3 of Schedule 2 – the definition of “public authority” for Chapter 2 – drops the residual “functions of a public nature” clause. A body is only a Chapter 2 public authority if it is either established by prerogative, enactment or Minister and wholly or mainly constituted by appointment made by the Crown – or if it is separately specified in regulations made by the Secretary of State.

Universities don’t satisfy either. Pre-92 councils are largely self-appointing under their Charters. Post-92 boards are made up of independent members, staff members and student members, not Crown appointees. Neither the establishment test nor the appointment test is comfortably met. Universities are out – unless the Secretary of State makes regulations bringing them in.

Twice asked, twice ducked

The Ministry of Justice has been asked about this twice now, and has given the same answer both times.

In February 2026, Alex Davies-Jones MP – junior justice minister and now Minister for Victims and Violence Against Women and Girls – wrote to Andrew Western MP in response to correspondence from a bereaved constituent asking whether the Hillsborough Law would introduce a duty of candour applicable to universities. The answer:

The Duty of Candour and Assistance will apply to any body when exercising public functions, this would capture some aspects of the work of universities and other Higher Education Institutions. The Duty also extends to those with a relevant health and safety responsibility, as well as relevant public sector contractors.

Five weeks later, on 23 March, Siân Berry MP (Green, Brighton Pavilion) tabled a written question asking the Secretary of State for Justice “whether the Public Office (Accountability) Bill will explicitly apply to all universities.” Davies-Jones answered on 31 March. The wording was virtually identical – same sentence, same order, same omissions.

Both answers name the Chapter 1 duty of candour and assistance. Both invoke the “public functions” test that only appears in Part 2 of Schedule 2. Both confirm the section 4 contractor extension. But both are pointedly silent on Chapter 2.

Berry asked whether the Bill would “explicitly apply to all universities.” Twice, the government has taken the opportunity not to say yes.

Over to the Lords

There are two ways the gap could be closed as the Bill moves through the second chamber.

Peers could table amendments naming higher education providers in Part 3 of Schedule 2, alongside the schools and further education providers who are already there. That would put universities inside Chapter 2 on the face of the Act, with no further steps required.

Or the Secretary of State could exercise the regulation-making power at paragraph 4(4) of Schedule 2 – which lets the appropriate national authority specify additional bodies exercising public functions – to bring universities within Chapter 2 by secondary legislation. That would need affirmative-procedure regulations laid before Parliament, but it wouldn’t need any further primary legislation.

Either would work – but so far the government has indicated an appetite for neither.

There is a third option. In England, the Office for Students could hardwire candour into its Public Interest Governance Principles as a condition of registration, and the Office of the Independent Adjudicator could rewrite its Good Practice Framework to require candour in complaints handling.

Universities receive billions of pounds of publicly-underwritten tuition fee income each year. They exercise powers over admission, assessment and awards that are treated as public functions in almost every other legal context.

They house, feed, discipline, support, employ and – when things go catastrophically wrong – mourn young people. The Office for Students exists precisely because higher education is treated as a matter of public interest requiring statutory oversight.

Universities are already public authorities for the purposes of the Human Rights Act and the Freedom of Information Act. They will be public authorities for Chapter 1 of the Hillsborough Law when a student has died. They will not, as the Bill stands, be public authorities for the everyday duty that could reshape how universities handle complaints, safeguarding and internal review.

If the state is being rewired for the benefit of the public, students are part of the public. If the Bill is – in Burnham’s words this evening – about placing decency back at the heart of the British state, then students dealing with universities every day deserve the same decency being promised to families dealing with hospitals, schools, police forces and councils.

There will be those that will say the duty is unnecessary on the basis that universities already behave in this way. If that’s true, nobody has anything to fear from a new duty. If not, that’s why the duty needs to apply. Whether the Lords or the Secretary of State fix the hole is irrelevant – it needs fixing.