Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Boswell of Aynho]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, in this matter. I have only two points of divergence from what she has said, and they will be of a rather different character. I emphasise the noble Baroness’s praise for the efforts of Ministers to take up and address the fears that a number of us have expressed.

My first point of divergence from the noble Baroness is simply that she cannot praise herself, but I hope I may do so for her. She, and to some extent I, were participants in some of those earlier explanatory meetings after the initial flurry on this matter, when I found myself unable to support the Government, which is not my usual stance, because of the concerns that have been expressed. I know that Ministers have gone to an exceptional level of trouble, culminating in decisions this week to give us, in effect, the substance of what we want. It is perhaps difficult to score but as a percentage of the overall objective it is in the high 90s. I shall come back to that in a moment. It is an object lesson in how to do it.

To unpack the concerns that I and others expressed at the time, the coronial system, which had grown up locally and was delivered differently in different areas, had been perceptibly unresponsive to the needs of its users and often quite harsh to people who felt themselves vulnerable. In particular, it was uneven in its delivery. Something had to be done and I think the Government have now done it. I very much hope that the chief coroner, who has now been reinstated as the lead and the champion in this matter, will be able to take the agenda forward.

My other point of divergence from the noble Baroness is over the appeal system. It is of course right that we should raise that. It would be helpful if the Minister, in his response, said a little more about the managerial functions, which report to him in the Ministry of Justice; the judicial functions, which report to the chief coroner; and the overarching function of seeing that the system works satisfactorily and in accordance with the charter for bereaved people and is meeting their needs. He needs to set that out for us again, despite the helpful letter that he has circulated.

The area where I am mildly in dissent with the noble Baroness is that of appeals. Frankly, this is partly because when one has extracted nearly all the juice from the orange, it may or may not be prudent to put it to the final point. However, there is also a point of substance here, which I hope noble Lords will consider. One of the concerns that Ministers had was that in having a chief coroner they would be seen to be mixing up the administrative side with the judicial side. Although an inquest is a judicial process, it is not the normal kind of judicial process. I speak as a non-lawyer. It is not adversarial; there are no parties to it, although there are interested parties, including the bereaved families; and there is no judgment in favour of one side or the other. There are findings of fact, which may be right or wrong. Therefore, it is not necessarily self-evident that we need to cap this process of finding facts with a second tier of appeals, even if there are—as I am sure there are—some bereaved families whose concern, or duty to their loved ones as they see it, would lead them into further rounds of appeals until the process was exhausted.

I am not particularly keen on an appeal process, but one of the reasons why people wanted it was because the coronial system, as it had been delivered, probably deserved one because many inquests were flawed or not well conducted. There may be an argument that in those prelapsarian days, when we had no training and there was no overall supervision—which the chief coroner will now give—there was an uneven, patchy and unfair service. I hope that will be remedied without going through the second stage of an appeal process. If that was the major element of cost, and if it was a concern—as I am sure it was to Ministers—and it can be eliminated, whatever the exact figure, I think that would be sensible.

However, we have essentially secured the main prize: the survival of the position of the chief coroner. I remember the saying of the Roman poet: “You may kick out nature with a pitchfork, but somehow she will always come back”. This miraculously seems to have happened at the last moment with the chief coroner. I welcome that. The families of the bereaved will welcome it too, and we should not look the gift horse of government Ministers in the mouth. We should welcome what they are offering and accept it.

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

My Lords, I am extremely grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, for enabling Parliament to get back to the place where it should have been, and was, after the Coroners Act. She has done a tremendous job. It has also brought forth something that she mentioned briefly in her speech—she is now involved in the training of coroners. Already there is tremendous progress. I am also hugely grateful for all the work that my noble friend Lord McNally has put into this matter, because I am sure it is not easy to turn the ship of government around when it is sailing so fast in one direction. I can imagine the sort of effort that he had to put in.

The Royal British Legion and Inquest deserve particular gratitude, as do all the other organisations that signed the letter to the Times. A lot of them are run and supported by bereaved families, and it is not easy to go out and campaign when in the midst of grief. Some of those parents and siblings came to give evidence to parliamentarians about what had happened to them at inquests. I should like to take this opportunity to put on record my thanks to those people for giving us examples of why not only the training but the attitude of coroners to issues such as timeliness are extremely important.

I have one question for the Minister. The charter on the table is not now just for bereaved people but for anyone who comes before the coronial system. Some of us, including me, certainly felt that it should be a charter for bereaved people. It is not yet finalised and I hope that the chief coroner, who will be in a wonderful position to cast his or her eye over the draft charter, will have an opportunity to comment on it and perhaps improve it in the light of the things that he or she hears when talking to coroners.

Finally, I wish to comment from a purely personal point of view on the issue of appeals. The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, made some very good points about the fact that the issue could lie on the table and be implemented later, if necessary, but my heart lies with the government position, and it is not really a question of cost. In many cases, there will never be real satisfaction for the bereaved because, even though the process may have been thorough, timely and open, that is just the nature of bereavement; there is no satisfaction. If the chief coroner manages with all his other coroners to get the process right, there should be no need for appeals. There will obviously be an interim period that will not be entirely satisfactory, but the package on the table is all that we could have hoped for and is one for which I am particularly grateful.

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

My Lords, I am going quietly on Amendment 54, but not on Amendment 53. I will go more loudly, but briefly, on this. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, on her success. I thank the Government for giving her that success, even though she is showing some signs of looking the gift horse in the mouth. I have one very small point that is not about appeals, but about suicides. I declare an interest as the chair of a mental health trust.

One of the problems with the coronial system has been the great inconsistency between the verdicts of coroners, some of whom, it is alleged—I am not an expert on this but I have been to a number of meetings with people who have studied it very carefully—prefer to find suicides as accidental deaths to spare the families. I cannot vouch for that, but that is what is reported by reputable researchers. The Department of Health is devising a suicide prevention strategy. I do not see how such a strategy can be devised, let alone measured, unless there is consistency in coronial verdicts around the country. One thing that is required from a chief coroner’s office is the need to ensure consistency. I should be grateful for an assurance that part of the role envisaged will be to seek to bring about greater consistency in the practice of coronial courts around the country. I believe that I see the noble Baroness nodding her head at that proposition.