Coroners and Justice Bill

I rise to make a brief contribution, particularly on the issue of military inquests, in which I have a particular interest. I am a Wiltshire Member and it is the Wiltshire coroner who currently carries out the vast bulk of military inquests—although previously it was the Oxford coroner—because of the geographical peculiarity that our casualties from Afghanistan and Iraq are repatriated through RAF Lyneham in my constituency. I raised the matter of military inquests in Committee. The Under-Secretary immediately responded to my concerns about whether they would be subject to the Bill's provisions by saying that most military inquests already have no jury. She is to a certain degree correct, but she is also incorrect in that the Coroners Act 1988 stipulates that the coroner may ask for a jury in military inquests, although they only occasionally do so—I believe a case is at present being considered in the Court of Appeal. Therefore, she was not quite right that all military inquests have no jury, although many of them do not. What we are considering today is a special case. I welcome the fact that the Secretary of State has altered the provisions considerably since their introduction. I understand his point that incredibly few cases would fall under the provisions of clause 11—he anticipates one or two cases going through the designated procedures and going to the High Court. However, he is asking us to put on the statute book laws that a Secretary of State—not him, but someone at some stage in the dim and distant future—may use not for the laudable aims he has described, but for the much less honourable purpose of avoiding Government embarrassment and the like. In order to illustrate my point, it might be helpful if I focus on one recent inquest carried out by the excellent Wiltshire coroner David Masters. Although he has retired as a coroner, I am very glad he agreed to carry on as a particular specialist in military inquests. He will continue to hear some of those inquests as a deputy coroner. The inquest I have in mind is that into the tragic loss of Hercules XV179, which was on its way from Baghdad into northern Iraq, flying at an extraordinarily low level. It went down with 10 soldiers and airmen on board, all of whom were lost. Many of them were my constituents, or were at least based in my constituency. There are all sorts of peculiarities about XV179. The plane was flying at remarkably low level and it was on special forces duties. That has been made plain but a number of things about the special forces duties in the evidence given to David Masters were redacted, and perfectly happily so. Indeed, there were all sorts of secret things we never got to know about because they were secret and that is fine. Other peculiarities of the case included the fact that David Masters discovered that the Americans knew there was enemy activity in the area where XV179 was on that day, but they failed to pass that on to the British, so the pilot did not know that. Curiously, the Americans refused to come to the Wiltshire inquest and to give evidence to it, because they felt it might be embarrassing to them as they had failed to pass that intelligence on. It is clear that there had been a breakdown in intelligence between the two countries. As I said, there were a variety of very peculiar things with regard to Hercules XV179, so David Masters looked into them and he came to a perfectly satisfactory conclusion. He said that it was shot down by enemy fire—probably small arms fire; possibly a rocket-propelled grenade—and this was a tragic loss. The case had one other element and he looked into that too, concluding that had the plane been fitted with suppressant foam in the wing tanks, as all the Australian and American Hercules planes are, there is a chance that the tragedy—it is no certainty—might not have occurred. He was rather critical of the fact that the Government had not fitted the foam in the wing tanks, and he gave the Government quite a hard time over it. Of course, the Oxford coroner had recorded something similar with regard to the Nimrod case and two or three other military inquests of that kind. Although the Government say that the Bill's provisions are not designed in any shape, size or form to interfere with the coronial process, which worked extraordinarily well in the case of flight XV179, the circumstances of that case fit, without question, into the definitions as laid down in the Bill. It is perfectly possible that some Secretary of State in the future, seeking to avoid embarrassment for the Government over suppressant foam, to avoid upsetting the Americans over the failure of intelligence or to keep secret—perfectly properly—the fact that it was a special forces flight, might use any of those excuses to say to the High Court, "These are important matters and it is important that we should not hear this inquest in public, because it is against the national interest."