Coroners and Justice Bill

I am grateful to the Minister for his full reply. I must begin by saying that I am not totally reassured, and I believe that this is something that we need to continue to discuss and came back to on Report. I am also grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to this debate. There are a few points I would like to make, just to underline my reservations. I assure the House that I will be as brief as I can on these. It is true that there are groups in society that do not want delays and who are worried about the body being tampered with after death. However, I think we should not be under any illusion that the non-invasive MRI is a substitute for a full post-mortem. It is not: the trials that have been done demonstrate that one gets different bits of information. I am concerned that the public may be feeling misled. It is also quite expensive to undertake these investigations, so there is therefore a problem of cost. Moreover, the machines in use for post-mortems either must be dedicated machines, or—if they are also patient machines—they may be taking up patient investigation time. My main concerns relate to the post-mortem process being supervised by an appropriately trained pathologist. As the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, already said, there are many people who are members of the Royal College of Pathologists. Some of them are chemists, some are haematologists, but very few of them would be able to undertake a post-mortem. I am a registered medical practitioner of many years standing, but I would not be able to do a post-mortem with any degree of competence. It would be completely fallacious to pretend that I could. To do a post-mortem properly, one needs to be highly skilled with a great deal of training. My amendment does not state that the post-mortem itself has to be done start to finish by somebody with that level of training, but it says that it must be supervised by somebody with that level of training. Indeed, part of the initial preparation of the body and the closing-up afterwards does not have to be done by somebody with a very high degree of training at all. Certainly, however, somebody has to be available to come in and out to make sure that the standard of post-mortem is high. If the standard is not high, it is dangerously misleading and can create a false sense of reassurance. I have a concern that, when we may be faced with, for example, convictions of corporate manslaughter that could relate to deaths, it would be very important that a high quality of post-mortem is undertaken to provide the evidence to underpin, uphold or refute such a conviction. Will the Minister say whether there is a need for primary legislation to amend the Human Tissue Act, and to allow the Human Tissue Authority to change the codes of practice to extend the length of time and the amount of tissue that can be retained while consent is being sought? My understanding—but I may be wrong here—is that it would require primary legislation for a step in that process. I would also like to return later on to training—but I will not push the Minister on this now. If we do not train pathologists adequately, and we do not have a training environment created around post-mortems that are happening, we will indeed have an extending shortage of pathologists, and those we have will be inadequately trained. An inadequately trained pathologist would probably be more dangerous than not having enough pathologists around altogether, because there may be undue weight put on an opinion which is not appropriately or fully informed. That is another point to which I would like to refer after this debate. My last point relates to the retention of tissues and justice for families. It may be that there is a conviction over the death of a child that is inappropriate, because it was not the parents who were the cause of death, and the child had died naturally. We have already seen that happen. In the future, the opposite may occur, too; that there is a child’s death and the family is acquitted. The family is asked whether it consents to tissues being retained, but of course it says no and wants the tissues to be cremated. If there is a subsequent death in that family and the tissues have gone completely, there will be no way of linking across. We have an increasing range of chemicals that can be use in poisoning, and increasing access to all kinds of substances that are toxic and can be used. Not only gross external blows may be the cause of death, and I worry that, by not retaining even the blocks and slides, we may not do justice to the dead child or may commit a gross injustice through the wrongful conviction of parents who, acutely bereaved, are not in a position to argue their case. I would like to discuss with the Minister outside the confines of this debate some of the issues arising from the Human Tissue Act and whether primary legislation is required. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 41 withdrawn. Amendments 41A to 45 not moved. Clause 16 agreed. Clause 17 : Power to remove body Amendment 45A not moved. Clause 17 agreed. Amendment 46 not moved. House resumed.