Coroners and Justice Bill

I have two amendments in this group, which concern the resources available to coroners. First, I should like to address the resource of the premises available for a coroner to hold an inquest. The coroner is dependent on the local authority for allocating premises that can be used but, sadly, some of the premises are really not fit for purpose. Coroners have to have premises, ideally, where privacy can be observed and where the bereaved are not sitting in a room facing the person whom they believe to be the perpetrator of the death. Coroners need to have facilities where people in wheelchairs can be accommodated and can be heard if they are giving evidence. At the moment, some of the premises are such that somebody is shouting from a wheelchair in the middle of the floor. There are some premises where, by the time you have the interested parties and the press in, one wonders whether it is unsafe. Indeed, sometimes complaints have been made when the coroner, in the name of safety and fire regulations, has called a halt to the number of people who could even come into the room. If there is a jury present, the premises should allow privacy—not only a room to withdraw in, but privacy to go to the toilet. Some premises have only one male and one female toilet and it is inappropriate for a juror potentially to encounter somebody else when they have to go. During the course of a day, jurors are just like anybody else and they will need to go. Some premises do not have appropriate disabled toilets. Another problem can arise when the premises are adjacent to somewhere where there is a noisy activity going on—a dancing class, or whatever. It can be particularly difficult for someone who is deaf to hear proceedings adequately and such noise disturbs the thought processes. These are such serious matters that one feels that they should be heard with a degree of solemnity appropriate to the occasion in an appropriate environment. The other problem is that the relatives may be elderly, they may be distressed or they may have children in school. If a child knows that the inquest is happening that day into the death of their mum or dad, they deserve to be able to be collected from school, if at all possible, by the parent who is still alive, not farmed out to neighbours, other parents from school, or whatever. For that child, just knowing what is going on that day brings back all their grief. The difficulty is that some premises are difficult to get to by public transport and families without a car can face long travelling times with very sparse bus services if they are travelling from one area to another. We know that, for most of Britain, you can get in and out of London pretty quickly, but getting across country can be more difficult. It can be a similar situation within a coronial jurisdiction. My interest is the south Wales valleys—you can get up and down them very fast, but you certainly cannot get across them with any great ease. I am glad to see the Minister nodding in agreement from his own experience. The other difficulty, to which the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss alluded, is that the allocation of resources is dependent on the local authority and on the number of deaths. I understand that, if more than 3,000 deaths are referred to a coroner, you get more resources—higher levels of pay—and, below that number, there is a sliding scale. The difficulty is, of course, that in some areas you may get a lot of deaths reported. In one area, a lot of elderly people may die within 24 hours of being admitted to hospital, but those deaths do not require investigation, whereas in another area, where there is a younger population, you may get horrendous crimes, deaths through stabbings, accidents and so on that require investigation, so that the numbers reported to the coroner may be lower but the resources required by those coroners is much higher than in an area with an elderly population. I should like the coroner to be empowered in the event of there not being appropriate premises. It would be useful if the senior coroner was able to make representation to the relevant authority. My amendment at Clause 24(4) is, indeed, to strengthen those resources. As for benchmarking, which is a word in the amendments, there is a concern that you would benchmark against too low a standard, rather than benchmark against the highest standard, but the idea behind these amendments—I fully accept that the wording of them is not right—is to establish some kind of standard around the resources of all sorts that are available to a coroner so that they can conduct their inquiries appropriately and so that the needs of the bereaved can be genuinely catered for, as was the express intention of the Government when this Bill was introduced.