Victims and Prisoners Bill

Debate between Lord Wills and Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede

Report stage
Tuesday 30th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendment 118 opens this seventh group. It concerns publicly funded legal representation for bereaved people at inquests following a major incident. We would have preferred to table an amendment extending publicly funded legal representation to all bereaved people at inquests, but I understand that was not in scope. It has been a long-standing Labour commitment to extend publicly funded legal representation for bereaved people.

The current funding scheme allows state bodies unlimited access to public funds for the best legal teams and experts, while families often face a complex and demanding funding application process. Many are forced to pay large sums of money towards legal costs or represent themselves during this process. Others use crowdfunding. The Bill would represent a tiny opportunity to raise the need to positively shape the inquest system for bereaved people by establishing in law the principle of the equality of arms between families and public authority interested persons.

It is no longer conscionable to continue to deny bereaved families publicly funded legal representation while public bodies are legally represented. Without automatic access to non-means-tested legal aid, bereaved families are denied their voice and any meaningful role. The absence of representation weakens investigations into state action; funded representation of the bereaved can safeguard lives and ensure that mistakes or harmful practices are brought to light. I beg to move.

[Lord Wills (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendment 119 seeks to establish a code of practice for post-mortem processes. It arises out of a traumatic event suffered by Jenni Hicks, who lost her daughters Vicki and Sarah in the Hillsborough tragedy.

Perhaps the best way for your Lordships to understand the need for this amendment is to hear in Jenni Hicks’s own words what happened. This is how she described it in an email sent on 5 November 2022:

“I was asked if I would like to see 7 post, post mortem photographs of Vicki and 5 post, post mortem photographs of Sarah. I was warned they were both graphic and not pleasant. However, because of the 33yrs of lies, corruption, deception and lack of trust surrounding my daughters’ deaths, I chose to view them. I was shocked these photographs were in the hands of operation resolve. I’m aware the pathologists would have taken photographs to assist with causation of death and also to assist in writing the pathology reports. But, and it’s a huge but, I had assumed such graphic and sensitive photographs of naked bodies, including genitalia, would have been kept in a secure and safe environment. Not on a police computer”.


Moreover, as I understand it, the relevant injuries were to the head, and the genitalia were not pixelated, which they could easily have been. How could this have happened? These images existed for decades and, of all the many people who would have viewed them, not one of them thought, “This is not right”. It shows no respect for the dignity of the victims, who were young teenage girls. Why did not one person think that this was unacceptable? Not one did. If these had been the daughters of the people who had seen these images, year after year, one assumes that they would have been as profoundly upset and outraged as Jenni Hicks was. But they were not their daughters, so apparently no one cared. This unacceptable situation continued for decades.

For the most part, for whatever reason—and there may be many—a process of desensitisation often takes place in public authorities in the wake of major incidents such as this and on other occasions, apparently. This amendment seeks to put this right.

This amendment tries to address what is clearly an urgent need for a statutory code of conduct to preserve the dignity of the deceased and respect for the feelings of the bereaved. This is a probing amendment, as the Minister is aware. I understand that the Home Office is conducting a review to that end, so I assume that the Minister will want to await its outcome before deciding how to proceed. However, I would be grateful if he could confirm that the Government understand that this was unacceptable, that it must never recur and that they will give any new code of conduct the force of statute.