This chapter is not about the disaster of 1989 itself. It is about the implications for archives and for the role of archivists, specifically as a result of the work of the Independent Panel set up in 2010 to research the events of the disaster (Report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel, 2012 (hereafter RHIP)).

Although the work of the Panel ended in 2012 the legal consequences of the issues raised are still being considered in 2019 and records continue to be used (and indeed new ones managed) with the professional help of records managers and archivists.

Background

The Independent Panel which reported on the disaster was a response to the perceived needs of society for transparency as represented, in this case, by the long-standing expressed requirements of the people most affected by the man-made tragedy which killed 96 people – crushed to death, standing together, in locked football-ground pens at the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield on 15 April 1989. The response by the government in 2010, first Labour and then Conservative, was to establish an Independent Panel to review the evidence anew. For the families of those who lost their lives and the survivors, this disaster was, and is, a conflicted history, causing much personal pain to them, many of whom have been involved for over 25 years, and still are, in trying to obtain justice.

The families fought for the truth, which had been publicly disputed from the day itself, although the causes of the disaster had been more or less established by the Taylor Public Inquiry in its interim and final reports of 1989 and 1990 (RHIP, 186–225). They wanted the truth about what had happened on the day to be recognised by the media and the rest of society, and in particular by the government. In the press and elsewhere the blame had been firmly placed on the football fans themselves and this view was commonly believed, except by the families of those killed and many Liverpudlians.

The coroner's unusual ‘generic’ inquests of 1990, which considered the causes of the 95 (eventually 96) deaths together rather than individually had returned a verdict of ‘accidental death’ for the 95 who died (RHIP, 255–91).