Coroners and Justice Bill

I am grateful to the right hon. and learned Gentleman for his acknowledgement that there is a problem with which we must deal. There is, and that view is widely shared. We have made a fundamental change with these proposals, and to those who say that the parliamentary process does not work, I simply say that it does. Bluntly, these proposals are a million miles from how they started out in the original Counter-Terrorism Bill. Under the original proposals, the Secretary of State was to be of the opinion that there should be no jury, and his or her decision was to have been final—subject only to the possibility of judicial review. Furthermore, he or she would then have appointed the coroner. This Bill is completely different. I am certainly open to further consideration in the other place about how we should further tighten the criteria without losing the whole purpose of the measures. I turn to the second, really important limb. Even under the proposals originally presented by this Bill on publication, the Secretary of State was to have triggered the decision on whether there should be no jury—although the inquest was to have been held by a High Court judge rather than by an ordinary coroner; that was an improvement. I invite the House to turn to amendment 97 to see how these proposals differ. The Secretary of State makes a certification. There have been suggestions that the certification should be made by the court. However, the courts have always been reluctant to stand in the shoes of the Executive when it comes to judgments about national security. They do not want to make those decisions, as was made clear in a series of judgments, including by Lord Hoffman in the Rehman case.