Coroners and Justice Bill

I shall speak also to Amendments 93, 94, 96 and 131, which are in this group in my name and those of other noble Lords. For the families and the community as a whole, there are a number of important purposes for coroners’ inquests. It is not just a matter of the law being seen to be addressed. It is also important that bereaved families, friends and others feel some kind of satisfaction for themselves, which we can provide through the coroners’ inquests, not necessarily because particular guilt is identified, although that can be valuable, but to ensure that the same thing does not happen again for other people as individuals or society as a whole. It is not infrequent for us to hear it said by families or friends, subsequent to the loss of a loved one, that they did not die in vain. We often hear it said in respect, of course, of our military personnel, but we hear in other circumstances as well that their death has made a difference in some way, however it came about. It is also important for society as a whole that when deaths occur, if there are lessons to be learnt, those lessons are seriously taken up and not just put on a shelf in a report and forgotten about. There are a number of ways in which we could try through this Bill to press that. In these five amendments, there are two separate ways to address that. Amendments 91, 96 and 131 taken together identify the possibility of the coroner making material available, presenting it to relevant persons, forwarding it to the Chief Coroner and so on. But then there is a requirement on the Chief Coroner to collect that information, to seek out appropriate information from coroners around the country and to provide that to the Lord Chancellor and thence to Parliament. It has identified the timescales in which this might be done and so on. Another way to do this is described in Amendments 93 and 94, which are in a sense more prescriptive because they require that the coroners forward the information, which would be put together by the Chief Coroner and provided to Parliament. These are two similar ways of doing things: one simply puts the responsibility for drawing together the material at a higher level and is more permissive of the lower level; the other requires coroners at the local level to forward the information. However, whichever approach one takes, the purpose of the amendments is to ensure that if there are lessons to be learnt, those lessons will be taken seriously. For example, if someone has been negligent or has not been attending properly to a matter of health or safety or to some kind of procedure, the coroner will have some responsibility—and if not the coroner, the Chief Coroner will certainly have responsibility—to identify the problem or the pattern of the problem. He will be able to ensure that the people who need to know get to know, and that eventually it makes its way through to Parliament so that we are able to monitor these requirements and to hold people accountable for what they have done and for how they might learn from mistakes or inadequacies of the past. As I say, there are in these amendments at least two—one might argue three—ways in which this can be done. We look with interest to see how the Minister will respond because it may be that he has already given the matter some consideration. We certainly hope so. I beg to move.