Coroners and Justice Bill

I fully take the hon. Gentleman's point. The whole purpose of investigations is to make state officials accountable in a way that they would otherwise avoid. To the extent that we do not go along the route that the hon. Member for Hendon suggests, we will allow unaccountable state action of that sort to take place. The Government talk about national security, but as we have argued all along, there is no reason why an ordinary coroner's court could not carry out the task of protecting national security. It has the power to exclude the press and public or to issue public interest immunity certificates, and there is no reason why coroners or even juries should not be security vetted, as juries already are in espionage and treason trials. The question is, what is the size of the risk, which the Secretary of State keeps coming back to, that there will be errors by judges or in the security vetting of juries? I believe that he exaggerates it. There must be a risk, but to exaggerate it to justify the removal of a jury from the process is the wrong way to go. The Government keep coming back to the difference between criminal trials and coroners' proceedings, and they make the point that there is always the option of stopping a trial, whereas there is no such possibility in a coroner's inquest. That has never struck me as a particularly strong argument, because if there were a very important treason or espionage trial, how would it be in the public interest for prosecutors to believe that the right thing to do was to let someone they believed to be a spy, or worse, go free? In reality, stopping the trial is an option only in cases in which Government embarrassment is at stake, rather than real problems of spying, or worse. So that option does not really exist in criminal trials, either.