Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, as I read through this monster Bill I had an image of a civil servant going round the Ministry of Justice pushing a trolley and shouting, "Bring out your dead!", and people putting in it any old scrap of legislation that had anything to do with the word "justice". Coroners were the first, and all the rest came later. Like my noble and learned friend Lord Lloyd, I deplore these massive Bills dealing with vast numbers of different subjects. As the noble Lord, Lord Neill, said, the result is that there is inadequate time for the subjects to be properly scrutinised in the other place. That is truly the case with this Bill. What also worries me is that this is but one of five enormous Bills with which this House is faced. I wonder what the impact will be on legislative time and what will have to be dropped if the Government try to get through the contents of all these Bills, because all the issues need examination in their own right. We are all prisoners of our experience. I was extremely glad to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, talk so movingly about the plight of military widows and families. I saw their plight when I was Adjutant General during the first Gulf War. Also, when I was the Chief Inspector of Prisons and preparing my paper Suicide is Everyone’s Concern, the charity Inquest arranged for me to see the families of 10 people who had taken their lives in prison. It was the most emotional and harrowing day that I spent in that job. Those families’ stories about how they were handled by the Prison Service were shaming. They went into those inquests expecting to learn more about what had happened than an inquest is designed to give. There had also been delays of up to four years in the inquests. The Prison Service’s attitude was adversarial, and the service was represented by legal representatives, as the families were not. It was all summed up by someone who said, "What would you think if you saw the governor of the prison"—who was in fact a woman—"raising her arm and shouting ‘Yeah!’ when an open verdict was recorded?". My concern about the coroners part of the Bill is that it is inadequate in two separate respects. The first is that it is inadequate for the coroners themselves. My noble friend Lord Imbert has already asked why coroners are not part of Her Majesty’s Courts Service and, therefore, under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice. This impacts on their resources and their accommodation. If this is a serious part of the judicial system, why was the inquest into Mr Menezes’s death conducted in the Oval cricket ground because there was nowhere else to go? Why do coroners have to delay inquests because they cannot get suitable accommodation? Surely this is not a matter for coroners themselves; there must be a system to support them. Why do coroners have to go to local authorities for funding, making funding a postcode lottery? Why do they have to seek for all the staff they need? Why cannot they recommend proper legal representation of people who are there? Why do coroners have to wait 40 years for a pension when it is only 20 years for judges? Will the Government give local government the extra funding that the coroners need to carry out their purpose? When will we hear whether the Chief Coroner himself will have any resources to enable him to carry out the tasks that he has to do? I know that the Government consulted coroners in preparing the Bill. I also know that the coroners themselves feel that a very large number of their recommendations have not been picked up and included. I would therefore welcome from the Minister details of the provisions that the coroners said would help them to do their job but which have not been included. It is 109 years since the coroners’ system was last looked at. Regretfully, rather than tackling the whole issue root and branch, and all the bits, in one go, there has been a cherry-picking process which deals with only some of the bits and by no means all of them. The second group about which I am concerned are the families. The Minister mentioned that families are at the heart of the Bill, but the evidence does not back up that claim. Take the Prison Service. In 2007-08, the Prison Service spent just under £2 million on legal representation at inquests. In the same year, only 12 of 69 applications for extraordinary funding made by coroners to help the legal representation of families and others were accepted. Legal aid is just not obtainable for the families, and I include the military as well as the prison system in this. At times prison families have to go for means testing. If the families really are at the heart of the system, why are they not properly represented? Are the Government making the resources available in the Bill to enable that to be put right? There is no evidence of it. We have raised the subject many times in this House. For example, when debating the corporate manslaughter Bill, we mentioned that the families of people who had committed suicide were themselves victims of something that had happened at the hands of the state. If the state really means what it says about families, I would like to see on the face of the Bill evidence that that is right. I have one small rider to this. I support the comment made by my noble friend Lord Patel that it is important that those who commit suicide in special hospitals are properly looked after. The arrangements for people in special hospitals are not even as good as they are in prisons where, for example, the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman is required to investigate all unnatural deaths. I very much hope that we will hear about an improvement to the Bill to include special hospitals, because it will certainly come up when we are amending the Bill during Committee. It may seem, with that rant, as it were, on two issues, that I am totally opposed to the Bill. I am not. I am not opposed to the Bill in general or its aim in general. I am sad that, instead of focusing on that issue as a single issue and getting it right, the Government have dissipated it in yet another massive Bill in which there is a danger of all that is required going by default.