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, a university named as an interested person will be under a mandatory compliance direction, and so in the ordinary course will its vice chancellor. 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 carries a body of Human Rights Act case law behind it, though it is case law that has more often been read narrowly than generously – and how far it reaches into a chartered university or a higher education corporation has never been tested. 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 – out, but not for the reason you’d think

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 – works differently from Part 2. Paragraph 4(1)(j) catches any other body that meets the condition in sub-paragraph (2) or sub-paragraph (3).

Sub-paragraph (2) is an institutional test. A body qualifies if it is established by prerogative, enactment or Minister and is wholly or mainly constituted by appointment made by the Crown. Universities don’t meet it. 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.

Sub-paragraph (3) is the residual route, and at first glance it looks like the Part 2 test. A body qualifies if it exercises “specified public functions”, and is a Chapter 2 public authority only to the extent of those functions. The difference is the word specified. Paragraph 4(4) defines specified public functions as functions of a public nature “of a description specified in regulations made by the appropriate national authority.”

Which is the whole problem. Part 2’s residual test is self-executing – a coroner applies it to the facts in front of them. Part 3’s is not. It does nothing at all until somebody makes regulations describing what the functions are, and nobody has made any. Paragraph 4(3) is a switch with nobody’s hand on it.

So universities are out of Chapter 2. But not because Parliament has weighed them up and decided they should be, and not because of anything about universities in particular. They are out because the residual route has never been switched on for anyone at all.

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. It is worth being clear about what that would do. Schools and further education providers sit at paragraph 4(1)(i) unqualified, as authorities in the round rather than as hybrids. Adding higher education providers to that list would make universities Chapter 2 public authorities for everything they do, not merely for their public functions.

That is the right answer rather than an overreach. Chapter 2 carries no criminal liability – there is no offence attached to it, only the duty in clause 10 and a guidance power in clause 11. And a code of ethical conduct that applied to the public parts of a university and not the rest would be unworkable. The point of the code is that it reaches complaints handling, safeguarding, disciplinary panels, accommodation and consumer information. Nobody could operate one split down the middle.

Or the appropriate national authority could exercise the regulation-making power at paragraph 4(4) and switch the residual route on. Because that power describes functions rather than naming bodies, it is at once subtler and blunter than the amendment. Subtler because it need never mention higher education, and could describe a function wherever in the public realm it is exercised. Blunter because it would then catch everyone else exercising that function too, which is a conversation the department may not be in a hurry to have. It would need affirmative-procedure regulations laid before Parliament, but no 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.

The quieter hole

What none of those routes touches is Chapter 1. All of them are about the ethical code duty, and the two statutory ones live in Part 3 of Schedule 2, which defines “public authority” for that duty and nothing else. Part 2, which governs the inquest duty, has no specification power at all. Paragraph 2 leaves “functions of a public nature” entirely undefined, to be argued out coroner by coroner, case by case, with no mechanism for anyone to settle in advance which parts of a university are in and which are out.

That is the more serious gap, and much the quieter one. A university facing a coroner after a student death will be a public authority to the extent of its public functions, and nobody can currently tell it, or the coroner, or the family, what those are. Is student welfare a public function, a contractual arrangement or a moral ambition? The Bill does not say, and as drafted there is no route by which anyone can be made to say.

A specification power in Part 2 mirroring paragraphs 4(3) and 4(4) – so that the appropriate national authority can describe, in advance and on the record, which functions of a higher education provider are functions of a public nature – is the amendment that would actually change what happens in a coroner’s court. Nobody has asked for one.

Students are part of the public

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 listed by name as public authorities in Schedule 1 to the Freedom of Information Act. They will be public authorities for Chapter 1 of the Hillsborough Law when a student has died, to an extent nobody can yet specify. 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 holes is irrelevant – they need fixing.

Correction

This piece originally stated that Part 3 of Schedule 2 drops the residual “functions of a public nature” test, and that the regulation-making power at paragraph 4(4) allows the appropriate national authority to specify additional bodies. Neither is right. Part 3 retains a residual route at paragraphs 4(1)(j) and 4(3), and the power at 4(4) specifies descriptions of functions rather than bodies – which means universities are outside Chapter 2 not because the definition excludes them, but because no regulations have ever been made for anybody. The relevant passages have been rewritten and a section on Chapter 1 added. With thanks to Maggie Abrahart.