Public Bodies Bill [Lords]

I wish to confine my remarks to the issue of the office of chief coroner. Successive reviews and inquiries over many years have highlighted the need for a chief coroner to oversee standards and handle appeals to deal with unsatisfactory decisions. There are currently no performance management procedures and no appraisals on the performance of individual coroners. There is no culture of mandatory continuing professional development, as there is in the medical, legal or accountancy professions; some coroners may choose simply not to undergo further training and development, and no one is there to pull them up about it. There seems to have been, certainly over the past couple of years, almost universal consensus that having the post of chief coroner would bring about real progress in raising standards, and would provide leadership, direction and a degree of accountability. It is disappointing that we do not have that consensus now. The truth of the matter is that in my part of the world, the Teesside area, we need the coroner to improve and we need a much better service for families. For the best part of a decade, performance measures for the Teesside coroner have been significantly below the average for England and Wales. Eight years ago, the Teesside coroner, Mr Michael Sheffield, had a backlog of about 200 cases, and bereaved families had a wait of about 35 weeks—double the national average at the time—for an inquest to be completed. The then Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, responded to calls from local MPs of the time, such as Dari Taylor, the late and great Ashok Kumar and Vera Baird, as well as from my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Sir Stuart Bell), by launching an inquiry. Mr Sheffield claimed at the time that he welcomed an inquiry, stating, somewhat bizarrely:"““I hope that the terms of the inquiry will enable the cause of the backlog of inquests to be inquired into.””" That raises the question: if the coroner himself did not know the reasons for the delays, why did he not know and how could others hold him accountable for that? In the aftermath of the inquiry, performance measures for the Teesside coroner improved, but over the past few years they have grown steadily worse again. Last year, the average time taken in England and Wales to complete inquests was 27 weeks—just over six months—whereas the equivalent figure for the Teesside coroner's district was 43 weeks. The coroner's office took more than 12 months to complete inquests into 76 deaths—a quarter of all the deaths it investigated in 2010—and three quarters of all cases it investigated took more than six months to conclude. By contrast, the coroner for my Hartlepool constituency —Hartlepool and Teesside have traditionally had separate judicial administrative arrangements, and long may that continue—was able to conclude inquests in a significantly better time scale than the national average. The average time that the Hartlepool coroner took to investigate deaths in 2010 was only 20 weeks, and no investigation took more than 12 months to conclude. The Hartlepool coroner has consistently over-performed in terms of the time taken to conclude inquests. Why is there such a difference? Why is the difference in performance so striking? Why does Hartlepool do so well compared with the national average, whereas the Teesside district lags so far behind?