Judicial Review and Courts Bill

Bob Seely Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 26th October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dominic Raab]

We have addressed that issue in response to the report that the Select Committee put out. Our position has not changed. What I would say to the hon. Lady is that I am mindful of the ordeal her constituents went through. One reason we are taking forward these procedures is to reduce that anguish and stress and to ensure that the coroners’ courts in the process deliver a better outcome for the bereaved and others relying on that service.

[Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

I am delighted that my right hon. Friend is making this speech, and we support so much of the Bill. On principle, does he accept that DNA sampling for people buried at sea would speed things up and save time for police and coroners when body parts wash up anywhere on the UK coastline, because they could quickly identify where those body parts come from?

[Dominic Raab]

My hon. Friend has raised that point with me privately, and he has now raised it on the Floor of the House. I am committed to looking at it and getting back to him. I understand the point, which he has raised in his usual tenacious but clear way.

Finally, the Bill will pave the way for a new state-of-the-art combined courthouse in the City of London. That court will provide an additional 10 courtrooms, predominantly to hear economic crime cases, including white-collar crime, such as fraud, and high-value business and property cases. That will be a real boost to the capital and to our vision of global Britain as a centre for investment, dispute resolution and doing business with integrity around the world. Court users will benefit directly by having access to more modern facilities, including lifts, wide corridors and a range of other measures, making it more accessible for the disabled. The City courtroom will have enhanced custodial facilities, increasing its ability to hear more cases with the most serious type of defendants.

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[Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

Much of the Bill is eminently sensible, and there is much in it to support. Like most people, I am pretty fed up with politicised lawyers endlessly trying to game the system. We need the application of common sense, and to call this Bill authoritarian is an absolute misuse of the term.

I will not speak for more than four minutes or so. I want to talk about how we can improve the general principles of the Bill in respect of coroners’ time and police time spent dealing with cases in which bodies are washed up on the coastline, and in particular about the need for the mandatory taking of DNA samples from people who are to be buried at sea. I thank the Isle of Wight coroner, Caroline Sumeray, for her advice on this, and indeed for her work on behalf of Islanders.

There were three places in the UK where burial at sea was allowed: Tynemouth in the north-east, Newhaven in Sussex, and one and a half miles south-west of The Needles, on the Isle of Wight. Now, I understand, the area off The Needles is the only place where burial at sea is legal. At present there is no legal requirement for DNA samples to be taken from the bodies of the deceased.

The proposal for DNA sampling originated from an action at the UK Missing Persons Unit, which at the time was investigating about 60 unidentified bodies which had washed up over the previous year—not all at once, I hasten to add. The pathology unit at the Home Office undertook to progress that action, because every investigation involving a body washed up at sea requires a pathologist—and an awful lot of police time—to discover where the body might have come from. There is also the emotional distress of families who give DNA samples in the hope that it might be a relative of theirs; and if Aunt Madge has recently been buried at sea and, sadly, parts of her are washed up, the family do not necessarily want to give DNA samples because it is an unnecessary process.

There are about 10 burials at sea each year, and once or twice a year body parts are washed up on the coast of the Isle of Wight. At the end of 2016 a lower arm was found, and early in 2017 a matching skull was washed up. Later in the year, a man’s body was washed up near Brighstone, having come from Devon.

In October, a headless torso was found at Brook chine. In 2018, a skeleton was found on Barton beach and a skull was found in St Helens, with another being found later in the year in Seaview. The year after, a lady’s skeleton was washed up from Fishbourne, although that dated back to the bronze age. Clearly the tides had brought it up from a beach somewhere around Britain and it had been washed up on the Island. This is most likely to happen after storms, which either break up a coffin or force a body on to the land. They are often discovered by dog walkers on the beaches, and that is clearly not the sort of thing that they want to see first thing in the morning.

While this is a constituency issue for me, it could affect a coroner or police force anywhere in Britain that has a coastline. If we had a requirement for DNA sampling prior to burial at sea, it would be easy for the police or the coroner to check against the database and make a quick distinction about where the body part had come from. Clearly, if the database had no matching DNA sample, it could be a suicide, a murder or someone who had fallen off a liner somewhere in the world, but if a DNA sample could be matched, it would save police time, save the coroner’s time and save the emotional distress of the families involved.

The costs of the coastguards, helicopters, police spotter planes and inquests all add up. One of the principles of the Bill involves using the coroners and the police to achieve more efficiency and, frankly, to do their work in a more productive way. I therefore believe that, as good as the Bill is, it could be improved by the facilitation of mandatory DNA sampling on the UK DNA database so that the police and coroners can quickly identify where body parts washed up on the UK coastline have come from.