Just 16 weeks ago, at the height of summer, Andy Burnham became the latest Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Later that day, he appointed Alex Norris as the new Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice.

Andy Burnham is the seventh Prime Minister since I joined APIL’s staff team in October 2010, with Alex Norris the thirteenth individual to serve as Lord Chancellor (and technically the fourteenth Lord Chancellor, since Dominic Raab did the job on two separate occasions).

That’s a lot of change over 16 years, before you even consider that we’ve also had Brexit and the coronavirus pandemic in that time.

Each new Prime Minister and Lord Chancellor has come with their own individual policy priorities. Previously, we’ve seen a focus on the number of whiplash claims, concerns about health and safety rules and their regulatory burden on businesses, and the cost of settling NHS negligence claims has been under constant scrutiny, with the potential for bad reforms. APIL has been involved in all these debates, and many others, always there to champion access to justice for victims of negligence. 

To campaign on these issues, and to contribute to those debates, we use all kinds of political tools and lobbying methods. We suggest parliamentary questions to help politicians get the right information, and we propose how legislation should be changed.

We also put forward our own ideas and research. At the start of September, we went to Parliament, where APIL’s president Guy Forster and joint vice president Suzanne Trask presented our latest research report on clinical negligence.

Then at the end of September, I went to Liverpool for the Labour Party conference, followed by Birmingham in October for the Conservative Party conference. I’ve said before these conferences present a unique opportunity to speak to politicians directly, without having to go through a diary secretary.

The conferences this year were no different.

In Liverpool I was able to speak to politicians including Lord Chancellor Alex Norris, justice minister Sarah Sackman, and patient safety minister Dame Diana Johnson, while in Birmingham I met shadow health secretary Damian Hinds.

I don’t want to mislead you here – these interactions are never in-depth policy discussions. But they allow me to put across APIL’s toplines on a particular issue, which I’ve then followed up in writing after the conferences.

It still remains to be seen, though, what the Andy Burnham Government means for victims of negligence. We’re still waiting for the Ministry of Justice to publish its review of the whiplash reforms, and for the Department of Health and Social Care to set out any plans it has to change clinical negligence law following its review.

But no one can deny that Andy Burnham is a believer in, and supporter of, justice. His work with the Hillsborough families is evidence of that. He told Parliament in the week before he became Prime Minister that the Hillsborough Bill would “rebalance the scales of justice so that we have justice for ordinary people going forward.”

I only hope that this vision of justice for ordinary people doesn’t just stop with the Hillsborough Bill.

Using all the political and lobbying tools at our disposal, and with the support of our members, APIL will continue to campaign on behalf of injured people, and urge the Prime Minister and his colleagues to ensure this vision of justice for ordinary people includes all injured victims of negligence.