Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Bishop of Lincoln and Lord Ramsbotham

Tuesday 14th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, I put my name to this amendment for two reasons: disappointment and respect. I am disappointed about this decision, given all the hours that we spent discussing the various stages of the Coroners and Justice Bill last year. The one constant throughout that process was a hope that, 109 years after the previous reform of the coronial system, a chief coroner would be appointed to lead us out of this morass. I say that because experience tells me that until and unless you have a named person with responsibility and accountability for actually making things happen, things do not happen. It is all very well saying that the Government intend to do this and the Government intend to do that, but that had been the situation for 109 years and it is not working. Only if a chief coroner is in place will there be a hope of leadership, consistency, drive and oversight of all the things that are listed. I refreshed my memory by reading the speeches of the late lamented Lord Kingsland, who I respected and who was so strongly in favour of the chief coroner in all our discussions. He, too, appreciated that at last this post constituted a way of reforming something that needed reforming.

At an earlier stage in the Committee, I mentioned that I was extremely disappointed in the impact assessment accompanying the Bill as it says that nothing that is proposed has any impact on either human rights or the criminal justice system. However, here we are, at Amendment 26, with goodness knows how many amendments to come, and already we have something which is driving terrible coaches and horses through both human rights and the criminal justice system. Then I looked at the so-called savings. They reminded me of a phrase that we used to use in the Army—“situating the appreciation”. An appreciation comprises examining a subject and then deciding what you are going to do about it. Sometimes people know what they are going to do and write a report to suit their solution. The maths ruthlessly exposed by my noble friend Lady Finlay shows that these costings are a sham. There has been no attempt to say how much more it would cost to have a chief coroner than to have all the improvements allegedly to be made by the Ministry of Justice which will achieve the same end. Until and unless we have an honest appraisal, it is dishonest to overturn the ruling of Parliament that something should be done to put right a system which has affected us for so long, and to endorse the decision of noble Lords in all parties to put bereavement at the heart of the process. That will be the case only if someone is responsible and accountable for seeing that it happens.

I am not going to rehearse all the cases that we dealt with affecting military inquests and inquests involving prisoners, delays, training of staff, consistency and the fact that you cannot obtain establishments in which to hold inquests because you are not a member of the court system. We have all been through all that. To risk throwing all that away is very dangerous, and I very much hope that the amendment will be supported.

[The Lord Bishop of Lincoln]

My Lords, as you might expect from these Benches, I should like to offer a pastoral word in support of the amendment.

One of the recent features of the discourse around bereavement has been closure, and the number of times that people now say, “All I want is closure”. There may be numerous reasons for that. It could be to do with the fact that we are now a society which is rather more distant from sudden and unexpected death than previous societies were, and therefore coping with those eventualities becomes that much more challenging. Closure becomes a significant dynamic in handling those kinds of bereavements. The need for closure could also relate to the culture of accountability in which we find ourselves, whereby people seem to need to be able to apportion not only a reason for why something happened, but perhaps a degree of blame and responsibility. That seems, rightly or wrongly, to be part of the culture of closure that matters to people these days.

I also have to say, of course, that another reason could be due to the declining reliance on the consolations of religion at the time of death, and therefore the search for other consolations would include a clear sense of what happened, why and at whose hand. If the amendment can enable the office of the chief coroner to add another dimension to the potential for people in their bereavement and sorrow to feel a sense of justice being done and, therefore, achieve a degree of closure, on those pastoral grounds, if no other, the amendment deserves support.