Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, would allow an Englishman to comment on this issue. We have debated this matter on many occasions; as the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsay, made clear and as the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, said, the same participants have appeared again and again. I am new to this debate as I am taking over from my late friend Lord Kingsland. I hope that I shall take much the same line. This issue has caused considerable unease in the House and elsewhere. As the Minister will be the first to admit when he comes to reply, the Government have clearly recognised that unease and have drawn back from some of their earlier and, dare I say, more offensive proposals. If the noble Lord remembers, the original Clauses 11 and 12, which swallowed up a great deal of time in another place, were then dropped without so much as a squeak by the Government when they realised that they would not be able to push them through your Lordships’ House. In a Written Statement which the noble Lord will remember, which was slipped out by the Lord Chancellor, we learnt that in difficult cases the Government would instead make use of the Inquiries Act 2005. In Committee, my late friend made it clear that he was still uneasy with those proposals and suggested the minimum changes that would need to be made to the 2005 Act for the Government’s proposals to be in any way acceptable. The first of those requirements was that, where an inquiry is to be used as an inquest, it will always be chaired either by a High Court judge or by a more senior judge. My late noble friend also considered that it would be an outrage if the Secretary of State attempted, in the course of an inquiry looking into the death of someone under Clause 5, to seek to change the terms of reference of that inquiry. In their Amendments 21 and following, the Government have sought to address those concerns. For that, at least, we are grateful and we are happy to accept the concessions which the Government have made, so far as they go, to make the use of the Inquiries Act more palatable. However, we do not believe that they have addressed the underlying problem which is the use of the coroner's court as the first choice to hear an inquest, not an inquiry established by the Executive. As a matter of principle, the Opposition would much prefer a solution based in the coronial context than one based in the context of the Inquiries Act. The Government want to use the Inquiries Act to fulfil the obligation to have a process to examine deaths at the hands of the state that cannot currently be dealt with by an inquest because of their refusal to budge on allowing certain types of information to be heard at an inquest. As the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, explained, the information and the methods by which it was collected fall under RIPA. We are very sympathetic to the noble Baroness’s amendments that allow RIPA material to be part of an inquest and create special provisions to protect the national interest in matters of true national security. When we debated the Counter-Terrorism Bill, we had a similar debate. My noble friend Lady Neville-Jones expressed the support of the Opposition for allowing intercept evidence to be admissible in inquests. She said: ""There is widespread support for this measure across your Lordships’ House and in another place. It will address an anomaly in RIPA and ensure that all inquests comply with Article 2 of the ECHR. The point is not simply that inquests should be institutionally independent, but that they should be prompt. Part of the problem here is that we are delaying justice in several cases, which is not good for the reputation of British justice".—[Official Report, 24/11/08; col. 1298.]." The Government have cast about for different solutions to the problem. They have moved by degrees, but have yet to come up with anything that commands widespread support throughout the House or elsewhere. We all know that groups such as INQUEST, Liberty and JUSTICE have thrown their weight behind the case for allowing intercept evidence to be heard in inquests. We do not wish to delay justice any longer. I do not know what the noble Baroness intends to do with her amendment or how the Government intend to respond to it. We will listen carefully to the Government and to the noble Baroness’s response, and if she is minded to test the opinion of the House, it is possible, depending on what the Government have to say, that we will support her.