Coroners and Justice Bill

I shall speak to Amendments 11 and 28, both of which are in this group. I welcome the fact that the Government are seeking to have these measures compliant with the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights. Amendment 11 would allow a coroner to ascertain the circumstances of a death in cases where there could be a risk to public health and safety or where the coroner believed that it was in the public interest. There may be cases not necessarily subject to the application of the Human Rights Act or the protection of the convention where it would surely be appropriate for an investigation into the relevant circumstances of the death to take place. I might perhaps best illustrate this by giving a number of examples. There might, for instance, be a death of a vulnerable person in a private care home. There might be a death in a private workplace. There might be a death involving British state agents in circumstances where the Human Rights Act does not apply because the date of death was before the Human Rights Act came into force, or because the location of death was abroad and outside the limited extraterritorial scope of the European Convention on Human Rights. It might be the death of a British national abroad, not involving British state agents but in circumstances where there was no prospect of adequate investigation by the host state. There might be deaths involving other circumstances that, if allowed to continue or recur, may result in the deaths of other members of the public. That is surely one of the key issues. If there is a problem that can be established, and doing so may save other people’s lives, I argue that it is appropriate that the Bill should cover that circumstance and give the coroner the power to investigate. That is the purpose of Amendment 11. On Amendment 28, the problem is that there seems to be a possible conflict between two parts of the Bill. These are the general duty on coroners outlined in Clause 5 and what is said in Clause 10, particularly subsection (2), to the effect that a determination from a coroner may not be worded in a way that appears to declare a person guilty of a criminal offence or to determine a civil liability. On the face of it, that may not seem improper, but a coroner might interpret it as a constraint on the more general investigation of a death. The purpose of the amendment is to ensure that this constraint will not be a limiting factor on how the coroner approaches his responsibilities. The dilemma is a simple one. I hope that Amendment 28 is a way around that dilemma, in enabling the coroner to investigate a death without being constrained by the fear that he or she might be close to determining civil or criminal liability. It is a worthwhile amendment and I hope that the Minister will be sympathetic in his approach to it.