Coroners and Justice Bill

Amendment 13 is grouped with Amendments 4 and 6. The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, made several important points about the stress put on bereaved families when they have to wait for three, four or five years for an inquest, and she rightly described how they have to relive the difficulties, memories and traumas invoked by the death. She also mentioned the issue of lessons learnt, which is extremely important in terms of remedial action. The third reason to avoid delay is that it is also difficult for witnesses at an inquest to remember accurately. Memories can fade even after a few months, while after four or five years it is hard for anyone to remember events accurately. I have tabled an amendment that would simply insert the word "timely". The noble Baroness is right to say that we should not try to define what "timely" is, but when delay results because authorities have not got their act together, being inefficient and not prioritising the work that needs to be done—I refer to the police, local authorities, the Crown Prosecution Service and so on—it is clear that it is not the coroner who is delaying the proceedings. However, I would accept that a lack of resources may be a problem for coroners, and I recognise that the Government are trying to solve it in this Bill by enabling certain geographical changes. Inquests are delayed for many reasons. An organisation known as INQUEST has furnished me and, I am sure, many other noble Lords with a lot of examples of young people who have died in custody and the inquest has been delayed for four or five years. That is really unacceptable. There seems to be no good reason except that perhaps these deaths are not regarded as being worthy of being given the same priority as the Government now recognise needs to be given to deaths in the Armed Forces. We should not have a two-tier system of investigations into citizens’ deaths, whether they fought for this country or died in prison. People have families and lessons need to be learnt. I have kept my amendment simple because it can then be taken that an inquest was not held in a timely manner and a hook is available to go to judicial review. So far as I can see, if the process is unfair on a family and an inquest is not held, there is no means of going to judicial review. Although I accept that there may be other ways of doing this—and certainly the solution proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, is elegant because at the least a record should be kept and coroners should notify each other about delays—it may be best to go back to first principles. The Bill ought to recognise that an inquest should be timely.