West London Coroner’s Court

Debate between Andy Slaughter and James Berry

Wednesday 16th December 2015 Westminster Hall

[James Berry]

Finally on the delays at West London coroner’s court, it would be easy to blame the situation on cuts, but they are not to blame. I wrote to the chief executive of Hammersmith and Fulham Council, which is responsible for funding the coroner service in west London. He made it clear that although the council has had to make cuts to various areas, the coroner service has been protected from those cuts. The responsibility for sorting out this shambles lays squarely with the senior coroner for west London. He needs to get his house in order for the sake of bereaved families living across the boroughs represented here.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the comment that the hon. Gentleman just made. I have been copied into the letter that he received from the chief executive of Hammersmith and Fulham Council, dated yesterday, which points that out. I am sure it was done in good faith, but on the hon. Gentleman’s website, he has said that the situation could be the council’s fault. I hope that he will correct that. One of the issues that we will deal with is putting blame for this matter where it lies.

[James Berry]

I do not intend to go into the technicalities of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, but it is a matter of interpretation as to whether the local council or the police are responsible for providing administrative staff. However, the council is quite clear that there have been no cuts to the funding that it believes it ought to be providing.

Moving on to the subject of religious burials, Jewish and Muslim families have to bury their dead in a matter of days, and the pressure on those doing so is compounded by the situation at West London coroner’s court. I need not say any more about that, because I can simply welcome the Minister’s recent announcement of a review into the interaction that some faiths have with the coroner service across the whole country. I simply observe that in diverse communities, such as those served by the West London coroner’s court and by MPs here, a reliable out-of-hours process for death certificates that are required over the weekend would seem to be the most sensible way forward.

The third point I would like to make is on the matter of national application—the requirement to hold an inquest when someone dies while subject to deprivation of liberty safeguards. Section 1 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 requires that a coroner holds an inquest in certain defined circumstances such as a death in state detention, or a violent or unnatural death. In other cases, the coroner has discretion as to whether to open an inquest, depending on the facts.

Since the Mental Capacity Act 2005 came into force, the definition of whether someone is detained or deprived of their liberty has been tested in the courts on numerous times. In March 2014, the Court of Appeal considered the cases of P v. Cheshire West and Cheshire Council, and P and Q v. Surrey County Council. In those cases, the Court of Appeal gave a very broad definition of deprivation of liberty. The result of that decision has been that authorisations now have to be sought for deprivation of liberty in many more cases than they used to. That includes most cases where a person suffering from dementia lives in a care home and would be prevented from leaving if they attempted to. An inquest must be held in each of those cases because the individual is deemed to be in state detention. In my constituency, we have a nursing home in which 90% of the residents are subject to the deprivation of liberty safeguards. On the current interpretation of the law, there would have to be an inquest into each and every one of those individuals’ death, even if they died entirely predictably in their sleep.

I am not saying that there should be no inquests at all into deaths where the deceased is subject to the deprivation of liberty safeguards—far from it. I am arguing that inquests should be opened at the coroner’s discretion; they should not be mandatory. It was certainly not the intention of this House in passing the Coroners and Justice Act or the Mental Capacity Act to mandate an inquest in every case in which the deprivation of liberty safeguards apply, nor was it the Court of Appeal’s intention in the P and Q cases, so far as I can work out; the issue was not canvassed before the Court at all because the case did not concern inquests.

In support of my point, the Chief Coroner of England and Wales highlighted the problem in his 2014 annual report to the Government, and highlighted the massive increase in the number of deprivation of liberty safeguards from 11,300 in 2013-14 to some 83,000 in the first three quarters of 2014-15, which will inevitably lead to a huge number of additional inquests. I ask the Minister to find legislative time, as a matter of real priority, to exempt people who die while they are subject to deprivation of liberty safeguards from the mandatory requirement to hold an inquest. That change would reduce the pressure that is building on coroners across the country. It would help, but by no means resolve, the problems at the West London coroner’s court, to which I return in closing. It is clear that something must be done to improve the terrible standards of service in that coroner’s court.