Coroners and Justice Bill

There is not a good reason in respect of the inquests to which the hon. Gentleman has referred. I shall detain the House without taking interventions to go through the changes that have been made. In respect of the system being set up, it is my wish that the occasions when the court—not Ministers—comes to the view that an inquest without a jury is necessary will be very few and far between, and we do not anticipate that military service inquests will be involved. I want to pick up the wording of the Bar Council and go through the fundamental recasting of the proposals. First, the criteria in the amendments have been significantly tightened. I shall come to the issue of the relationship between the United Kingdom and another country, but first I ask Members to look at amendment 94. Three criteria are set out. Paragraph (d) states that the Secretary of State has to be""of the opinion that it is necessary for the inquest to be held without a jury in order to avoid protected matters being made public or unlawfully disclosed."" Not only were the criteria wider before, but the Secretary of State had simply to be "of the opinion"; now he or she would have to be""of the opinion that it is necessary"." We have greatly reduced and tightened the criteria; what was generally regarded, including by me, as catch-all criteria have been removed altogether. There does not seem to be any argument in the House about the interests of national security or the prevention or detection of crime. As far as the relationship between the United Kingdom and another country is concerned, there is no suggestion whatever that such conditions should be used to cover up embarrassment on the part of the United Kingdom; that would be not only a preposterous but a worthless exercise for any Secretary of State, as I shall explain. In evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights, the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, East (Bridget Prentice), set out in detail an example in which we had co-operated with a foreign country over the detection and interception of drug dealers; for the reasons given, that would not necessarily come under national security or the detection or prevention of a crime. If the circumstances of our involvement were to be disclosed, that could not only seriously disrupt our relations with that foreign country, but lead to a lack of co-operation on central issues relating to our and that country's interests.