Coroners and Justice Bill

I shall speak to Amendments 2 and 3. In beginning his speech, the noble Lord, Lord Alton, referred us back to the Shipman inquiry and the dreadful events leading up to it. As I pointed out on Second Reading, the Government rightly moved very quickly to deal with some of the medical aspects, but it has taken more time to deal with the coroners aspects. It seems to me that the important point in the comments just made by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, is that sufficient attention had not been paid to the clustering of deaths. If proper attention had been paid, it would have been clear that there was an emerging problem. Indeed, as I understand it, the first observation of the problem ultimately came not from the coroners but from others. As we go through the Bill we will find a number of circumstances that bring us back to that dreadful experience, because part of the business of the Bill is to address and redress that experience. One of the ways of doing that is to give the coroners the responsibility to look a little more widely than they have traditionally done. That is very important. As the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, said when speaking to his amendment, which we support, we all welcome the new extended duty to investigate deaths in state detention; we very much welcome the human rights-enhancing components of this measure. As he said, however, it is a little disappointing that we find this only in the Explanatory Notes. There does not seem to be any reason why it should not be spelt out and explained in the Bill. "State detention" has different meanings to different people. It is important to spell it out and to make it clear, as he has done in his amendment. If another, more precise amendment is proposed, so be it, but we think that it is important to spell it out. That is not to say that we take the view that coroners should restrict themselves to investigating whether we are all compliant with the human rights convention. We will come to that a little later. Perhaps I may point out one specific way in which even the excellent amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, seems not to go quite far enough. He refers in paragraph (b) to those detained under mental health legislation. What we usually think about is how important it is to ensure that people are not inappropriately detained under any legislation, including mental health legislation. However, one way in which a death can not infrequently occur is not in relation to the implementation of the mental health legislation but precisely at the point where the person is no longer detained. They are detained because it is felt that they are suicidal and a danger to themselves. So they are detained in an appropriate place and given an assessment and treatment. At that point they will probably, we hope, be in somewhat less danger. They then present themselves in a reasonable fashion for a time—I have seen this happen myself. So the detention is stopped and they are no longer detained by the state. Often that is precisely the point at which they are at much greater danger of doing harm to themselves and coming into the purview of the coroner. So even if we were to adopt the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Dubs—as I say, we very much support adopting it—one incredibly important group of people would not be addressed, precisely because they had moved out of state detention at the very point when they came to harm. That is why not only the noble Lord’s amendment but the prior amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, are very important. I think that we will also come to other amendments that will help expand this a little further. At this point, however, we find these amendments extremely helpful. We look forward to the Minister’s comments.