Andy Burnham wants the best for infected blood scandal victims – but it won’t work

The former health secretary makes a powerful case for a ‘Hillsborough law’, imposing a duty of candour on public servants, writes John Rentoul. Yet his solutions are unlikely to help avoid similar disasters in future

Andy Burnham has led the way in calling for corporate manslaughter charges to be brought against Whitehall departments (Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire)

There is no doubt that Andy Burnham, the former health secretary who is now responsible for health spending in Greater Manchester as mayor, spoke for millions on the Today programme this morning about the infected blood inquiry: “Every main party in parliament let the families down; the question is what now and what we do about that.”

He has led the way in calling for corporate manslaughter charges to be brought against Whitehall departments, and now advocates a “Hillsborough law”, imposing “a duty of candour on all public servants”.

But he should be cautious about the rush to legislation as the instinctive response to evidence of system failure. He is quite right that the roll call of bureaucratic denial and obfuscation in “the Post Office, Hillsborough, Grenfell, Windrush, blood, nuclear test veterans” suggests that there is something fundamentally wrong with “the system”. But it is unclear how prosecutions of Whitehall brass plates and new laws intended to force civil servants and politicians to tell the truth would help.