Coroners and Justice Bill

I shall be brief. I repeat what I said: I acknowledge that the Government have a problem. In the other place, amendments were tabled by Baroness Miller. As the Secretary of State knows from my earlier remarks, and as is implicit in the amendments tabled in lieu, there is an acknowledgement that to allow intercept evidence would be very difficult at this stage. My party is on the record on countless occasions as wishing to see intercept evidence available in criminal trials and at inquests. That is desirable and it is a shift that needs to take place. I regret that the movement on this is so slow. We subscribed to the Chilcot process so that it could be reviewed, and the Chilcot process is not yet complete. Therefore I acknowledge that to ride a coach and horses through that would be unsatisfactory, even though it is an end that I would wish to see, properly arrived at. The question then is how we solve the conundrum. The Secretary of State is right that the Bill has been up hill and down dale. He wanted to have a provision for secret inquests that could hear evidence secretly. He received universal opprobrium for that, partly because it debased the entire coronial system. As he will recollect, when the matter came to be discussed on Report, I suggested to him that it would be better if we called a spade a spade, and if we could not have an inquest in proper form, it would be better to look at the inquiry route, which already existed, as an alternative. At least the Secretary of State or some other Minister would have to explain to the House why an inquest was impossible, answer the hostile questioning of the House and enable Members to express a view, and then and only then, with probably a great deal of public debate surrounding the matter, would an inquiry go ahead. It is also true, as I hope I made clear on Report, that when the matter went to the Lords in Committee, Lord Kingsland argued that if an inquiry route were to be pursued where normally an inquest would take place, there were a great many flaws in the inquiry procedure. He tried to rectify that. It was virtually the last speech he ever made. The Government accepted some of what he suggested, including the need for a High Court judge, and some other safeguards concerning the scope of the inquiry. What the Government did not do was to listen to Lord Kingsland's calls that that had to be a judicial process, not an administrative process. The Secretary of State highlighted my amendment (a) to amendment 128, and I am the first to accept that it is probably desperately inadequate. The procedures that we have in the House are now so barmy—there is no other way to describe them—that I had to draft the amendment even before the Bill had come back from the Lords. All I could do, with the help of the Clerk in charge of the legislation, and with the anxiety that as an amendment in lieu, anything more would probably not be accepted, was to find some way of bringing back to the House the issue of judicial control. Imperfect though the amendment may be, its purpose was simply to give the House the opportunity to say, "Perhaps if we have to have an inquiry, there should be a judicial lock on it." Interestingly, that is exactly what the Secretary of State hinted he was minded to grant in the original draft of clause 11(6). I am a little mystified about why he did not pursue the road that Lord Kingsland identified for him, because, if the Secretary of State had, we would not have ended up with the situation that we had in the House of Lords on Report, when everything went in all directions. I hope that I am not being unfair, but the anxiety that their lordships clearly manifested finally expressed itself in allowing intercept evidence.