Coroners and Justice Bill

My Amendments 33 to 36 are grouped with the government amendments. The Minister is right, there is a practicable problem. We debated it at length during our discussions on the Counter-Terrorism Bill and again when that Bill came back from the other place. We left it as unfinished business. There was a great deal of unhappiness at the idea of secret inquests, so we are very pleased that the Government have withdrawn that idea, at least. I am not going to address the RIPA provisions right now, because I have Amendment 30 to deal specifically with those more technical issues later, but it is impossible to address this issue without referring to RIPA. As the Minister said, every time we come to address this issue, we seem to be dealing with the one case—the unfinished inquest of Azelle Rodney—because this RIPA evidence is so sensitive. However, when we considered the anti-terrorism Bill, we were talking about two cases, because there was a second case, that of Terry Nicholas. In the intervening time, the Terry Nicholas case has, interestingly, been settled entirely by a coroner, redacting much of the evidence, with no problem at all. She made a series of judgments that enabled the inquest to go forward, be heard and be resolved. What the Government felt at that time was insoluble has since been solved, so we are looking at putting on to the statute book a whole different method of holding inquests simply to solve one case. I wonder whether that is a good way to do legislation. I see the downsides of an inquiry and I am not at all resolved that the Government have got the right solution to the problem. An inquiry, under the Inquiries Act, does not really fulfil any of the requirements that we are looking for with an open inquest. To begin with, the Secretary of State controls the appointment and the remit of the panel. There is also the big question as to whether it will cover the same ground as the statutory requirements of an inquest. As we discussed earlier in relation to the circumstances, it would be for the Minister to define all that. Therefore, whereas the coroner would control an inquest, it is likely that there would be strong ministerial control, as the Inquiries Act is drafted. There would be no jury asking questions, deciding facts and meeting public concerns. There would be private sittings, which would tend to be much less open and accessible to the public—obviously, because they are private. There is none of the purported scrutiny of the decision to keep evidence secret that the judicial review provisions would have provided for and there may not be sufficient funding made available to the parties to challenge any of this. The only possible advantage is that, following the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 amendments to RIPA, at least such inquiries can now receive RIPA material. That obviously gets around the issue of this one inquest that cannot be held at the moment and, in fairness to the family, they would very much welcome a resolution to the fact that their inquest cannot be heard. However, I think that, to resolve that one issue, we are in danger of putting on to the statute book a system of holding inquests that runs completely counter to the tone of all the discussion and debate that we have had this evening about having as full disclosure and discovery as possible, not only in the interests of the family, but in the wider interests of society. When we debated the Counter-Terrorism Bill, we cast our minds back to the "Death on the Rock" shootings—I expect that that would now be held as an inquiry and very little would come out. I am deeply unhappy at the Government’s suggestion that anything held under the Inquiries Act 2005 would substitute for an inquest. I understand why the Government have put this forward, because they are in a very difficult position with the Azelle Rodney case, but I hope that all Members of this Committee will view this proposition with a good degree of scepticism and that, during this debate, we might find a different way forward.