Elkan Abrahamson, Head of our Major Inquiries team who represented 20 families during the Hillsborough Inquests, records his thoughts on the 31st anniversary of the disaster and pays tribute to the Hillsborough families who had to cope with so many years, and still have to cope with so many years, of loss and injustice.

He considers the lessons learned from Hillsborough and how they may help us deal with the aftermath of Coronavirus.

Today is the 31st anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster and I have been asked to record my thoughts. We are also in the middle of what may be the first of many lockdowns due to the Coronavirus and this is relevant, and I’d like to think about the lessons learned from Hillsborough and how they may help us deal with the aftermath of the Coronavirus.

One of the things we learned after Hillsborough was that there is a collective will to deny responsibility. Usually it is the people at the top of the pyramid who make mistakes and then leave others to pick up those mistakes and deal with them and usually it is the people at the top who will do everything they can to avoid admitting responsibility.

So it is with coronavirus and I hope and expect that there is not now an effort going on amongst the people at the top to push the blame onto others and that we will eventually learn what went wrong, why the government delayed in the way it did and this should not be at the cost of taking steps now to deal with the awful situation that faces us. Hillsborough took us over a quarter of a century to uncover the rot that lay behind the disaster, it may be that it will take us as long to discover the government ineptitude and what led to it, I hope not, but I fear so.

Since Hillsborough we have been campaigning to have a duty of candour law to apply to all public bodies and we were fortunate in securing the support of the former Labour Shadow Cabinet. I have spoken to Keir Starmer the current Labour leader and he remains supportive of Hillsborough Law and I hope that this will come to fruition, albeit too late perhaps to deal with the Coronavirus fallout.

I pay tribute today to the Hillsborough families who had to cope with so many years, and still have to cope with so many years, of loss and injustice and I do hope this won’t happen again, unfortunately history teaches us that it will.