Every quarter, in a meeting room with bad biscuits, my team and I sit down and get the score of our suppliers. It is not a glamorous job. Delivery versus promise, invoice versus quotation, annual.
At the bottom of the spreadsheet sits a column, noble but deadly, titled refresh. Last month we shut down the firm we had been using for nine years. Dear people, it’s always nice to be on the phone. They simply stopped delivering what they said they would do, when they said they would do it, and in business that is the only sentence that matters.
I mention the spreadsheet because this week Labor handed Andy Burnham the keys to Downing Street, 322 names from 403 MPs, no one else standing, inauguration booked for 20th. And my first thought was not taxes, or growth, and what the gilt market was going to do with it all. My first thought was that the new Prime Minister is about to inherit the worst record in the national ledger, and every business owner in Britain knows exactly what the line is.
Because Westminster, when viewed from the customer’s end, is the worst contractor in Britain. It quotes over the years, invoices when asked and delivers with apologies. And the oldest work in its book was booked on April 15, 1989, when 97 Liverpool fans went to a football match and did not come home, and the state used doctors’ statements for the following decades, telling lies and blaming the deceased.
I remember, as if it were yesterday, watching Andy Burnham speak at Anfield at the 20th anniversary in April 2009. The Cabinet minister, an Evertonian, sent to represent the Labor government that had been in office for twelve years without lifting a finger in Hillsborough. The Kop interrupted him with a hymn of justice at 96, as the number stood, he yelled at him, and he stood there and took every second. Then he did something unheard of in his trade: he returned to London and did. Full disclosure of documents. Hillsborough independent panel. The 2012 report, the dismissed investigation, the 2016 verdict that the fans were unlawfully killed. In 2017 he put the first Hillsborough Act before the Commons, and died on the order paper when the election was called and Manchester wanted him.
Enter Sir Keir Starmer, an Arsenal fan and former Director of Public Prosecutions, who stood in Liverpool and promised the Hillsborough Act, which has a full duty of transparency against government officials, ahead of the 36th anniversary of the tragedy. April 2025 came and went without it. The bill went through Parliament in September, was delayed twice when officials argued over the intelligence agency’s recording, and had to be moved to a completely new session. Since this week, it has been sitting in the square to report to the Kings, after thirty-seven years the event was named after it. Find that against any provider review you like. Delivery against promise: nil.
Business students will recognize the nature of this. This request from families is not unusual. The statutory duty of chastity is simply the standard by which every director in Britain now lives. Sign accounts you know are fake and go to jail. Hide the fatal flaw in your product and the courts, insurers and customers will tear you apart, properly, within a year. The bill’s fact sheets outline the obligations any well-run plc can simply call on Tuesday. Hillsborough, the Post Office, infected blood: each taught the same lesson, which is that concealment always costs more than telling the truth. Dishonesty is not a moral failure that happens to be expensive. It’s the cost of failing to behave.
There is also a cold trading concept here. Investors are already clamoring for repayments on Britain’s borrowing, in part because no one really believes what Westminster says it will do next. A regime that legislates its own honesty, making it a crime to lie in an investigation, quietly telling everyone it works with in the world that their word counts. Candor, it turns out, is a growth policy.
I have previously asked whether Burnham could win over British entrepreneurs, and suggested that he might profitably borrow from Andy Street’s school work on economics. They both stood still. But his first act should not require a focus group and should not require a green paper. Reinstate the Hillsborough Rule, whole, unwatered, without carpentry, and pass it before the conference season. He was kicked out of Anfield by a government that didn’t want to do anything. Now he is in the government.
Do that, and these 97 finally got what the DPP man promised them and they didn’t deliver. Do that, and when the country next sits down to score its suppliers, Westminster may finally get something it hasn’t deserved since 1989.
Tick in the update column.
