Coroners and Justice Bill

Yes, it does. Typically, the intelligence agencies or the police have available to them intercept evidence which is highly incriminatory. That is, indeed, the argument in its favour, and the reason for its use in cases abroad. It has been judged to be in the wider public interest not to make it available up to now. Chilcot has come forward with his nine conditions, but on the whole we manage to find other means of ensuring that evidence is found. I should just point out to the House—this is not remotely a theological issue—that it has long been accepted that evidence obtained through recordings, such as hidden microphones, is adducible in court, and that is often used. The point here is that the compromise of techniques is far less. The balance in respect of public interest lies in favour of disclosure. We therefore put forward these proposals, and we sought to strengthen them in the interests of the parties not least by ensuring that a senior judge should be appointed to hold such inquiries. A series of amendments were put forward in the other place, which I am inviting the House to reject today. They propose that this evidence should be made available to a normal inquest court, save in certain very limited circumstances where the court has a power to withhold it from the inquest jury. The difficulty here is that under the amendments the coroner could disclose the material to the interested parties even if that could cause very considerable damage to other parties. I say with respect that this is where I identify the central flaw in the argument of Baroness Miller and her supporters, such as Inquest, Liberty and Justice, with whom I have talked and for whom I have great respect—and my clause 12 is an attempt to square this circle. Those three supporters have said that""it will remain possible for a judge conducting an investigation to ban or restrict the jury's or public's access to material that would be contrary to the interests of national security."" If that is so, we return to the central problem here: in these cases, where the evidence from the intercept is key to the cause of death—because if it were not, it would be possible to offer other information—we are expecting juries to come to a decision based on facts that have not been disclosed to them. Baroness Miller inadvertently made the same admission herself. On Report, she said of the Chilcot inquiry conditions that""it must be possible for the Government and all their advisers to work out a way to put those nine conditions into the Bill in such a way…that they can stay within the inquest system and the conditions can be fulfilled."—[Official Report, House of Lords, 21 October 2009; Vol. 713, c. 733.]" I have two things to say about that. First, some very assiduous and imaginative individuals—including two in this House—are sitting on the advisory panel on the implementation of Chilcot, and achieving this end is very difficult. Secondly, I say, with respect to Baroness Miller, that I do not believe that she had read Chilcot's nine conditions. The second of them, for example, says:""Intercepted material originating from the intelligence agencies shall not be disclosed beyond cleared judges, prosecutors, or special (defence) advocates, except in a form agreed by the originator."" There are various other restrictions on disclosure, too, so we are back in the same box. In a criminal trial, even where there are PIIs, it is fundamental that the trial judge ensures that there is a fair trial in every circumstance, and if he thinks there will not be a fair trial, including in respect of taking account of material he has seen under the PII, he can abort the trial. I say again that that is not a possibility in an inquest, which is an investigation into a death that has taken place.