Coroners and Justice Bill

I shall try to give some figures. The figures I have for costs for other government departments are a few years old. In 2004-05, Her Majesty’s Prison Service, as it then was, spent £901,000 on legal costs, including those of Treasury Solicitors, counsels’ fees and other related costs, and in the same year the Ministry of Defence spent £76,265 on inquests, although I concede readily that that figure has increased considerably in recent years given the significant improvements to the efficiency with which delays have been tackled. My figure of £240 million per year is for all inquests. If there was automatic legal representation for all inquests, the annual legal aid bill for inquests would be that sum.